How to be a Conservative Quotes

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
― Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative

“Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.”
― Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative

“Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.”
― Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative

“The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father’s grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“People settle by acquiring a first-person plural – a place, a community and a way of life that is ‘ours’. The need for this ‘we’ is not accepted by internationalists, by revolutionary socialists, or by intellectuals wedded to the Enlightenment’s timeless, placeless vision of the ideal community. But it is a fact, and indeed the primary fact from which all community and all politics begin. George Orwell noticed this, during the course of the Second World War. The disloyalty of the left intelligentsia was, for Orwell, all the more evident and all the more shocking, when set beside the simple, dogged ‘we’ of the ordinary people. And the real political choice, about which Orwell had no hesitation, was whether to join the intellectuals in their work of destruction, or to stand by the ordinary people in defending their country in its hour of need.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“a free economy is an economy run by free beings. And free beings are responsible beings. Economic transactions in a regime of private property depend not only on distinguishing mine from yours, but also on relating me to you. Without accountability, nobody is to be trusted, and without trust the virtues that are attributed to the free economy would not arise. Every”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Given that Europe’s legacy to the world consists in the two great goods of Christianity and democracy it is hardly surprising if the EU no longer has the endorsement of the European people, even if it has created a network of clients upon whose support it can always rely.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Locke’s essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal today seem to have little understanding of what this virtue really is. Toleration does not mean renouncing all opinions that others might find offensive. It does not mean an easy-going relativism or a belief that ‘anything goes’. On the contrary, it means accepting the right of others to think and act in ways of which you disapprove. It means being prepared to protect people from negative discrimination even when you hate what they think and what they feel. But”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“I believed that ‘freedom’ is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that ‘freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere’.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“John O’Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be destroyed for the sake of its illusory but absolute shadow. The new ‘theories’ that poured from the pens of Parisian intellectuals in their battle against the ‘structures’ of bourgeois society were not theories at all, but bundles of paradox, designed to reassure the student revolutionaries that, since law, order, science and truth are merely masks for bourgeois domination, it no longer matters what you think so long as you are on the side of the workers in their ‘struggle’. The genocides inspired by that struggle earned no mention in the writings of Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault and Lacan, even though one such genocide was beginning at that very moment in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot, a Paris-educated member of the French Communist Party.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Unlike the Medicare provisions, which were brought in by negotiation between the two principal parties, ‘Obamacare’ was the initiative of a single party, did not have the consent of the opposition and was concealed within 2,000 pages of legislative jargon that was never properly explained either to the public or to the members of Congress. Not surprisingly, therefore, the legislation has led to a polarization of opinion and a breakdown in the political process, each side claiming to represent the interests of the people, but neither side convinced that ‘the people’ includes those who did not vote for it.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Nor should we be surprised that it is absent from the world of the Islamists – even though forgiveness has an important place in the practice of Islam and in the morality of the Koran.4”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take over.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The ‘enlargement’ agenda has therefore become controversial all across Europe, and I return to the controversy in what follows.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“The culture of repudiation marks a crumbling of the Enlightenment in other ways. As is frequently remarked, the spirit of free enquiry is now disappearing from schools and universities in the West. Books are put on or struck off the curriculum on grounds of political correctness; speech codes and counselling services police the language and conduct of both students and teachers; many courses are designed to impart ideological conformity rather than free enquiry, and students are often penalized for having drawn some heretical conclusion about the leading issues of the day. In sensitive areas, such as the study of race and sex, censorship is overtly directed not only at students but also at any teacher, however impartial and scrupulous, who comes up with the wrong conclusions”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“Nietzsche is a favourite, since he made the point explicitly: ‘There are no truths,’ he wrote, ‘only interpretations.’ Either what Nietzsche said is true – in which case it is not true, since there are no truths – or it is false. But it is only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment that this response seems like a refutation. The new curriculum is in the business of marginalizing refutation, just as it marginalizes truth. This explains the appeal of those recent thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty – who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value or meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.1 Hence it is in vain to argue against the new authorities. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive ‘will to believe’ that captures their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they ‘put in question’ – namely, the possibility of rational argument. Each of them owes his reputation to a kind of religious faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one. For this is the faith on which a new form of membership is founded – a first-person plural of denial.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“All such thoughts were issued as warnings. The freedom won through enlightenment, they implied, was a fragile and threatened thing. It depended upon a cultural base that it could not itself guarantee. Only if people are held together by stronger bonds than the bond of free choice can free choice be raised to the prominence that the new political order promised. And those stronger bonds are buried deep in the community, woven by custom, ceremony, language and religious need. Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative

“It should not be doubted that our inheritance of secular law is precious, and something that we should hold onto in the face of the many threats to it. It is our principal defence against what Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill denounced as the tyranny of the majority. Majority opinion may be wrong; majority desires may be wicked; majority strength may be dangerous. There is someone more important than the majority, namely the person who disagrees with it. We must protect that person. He is the one who can raise the question that no crowd wants to listen to, which is the question whether it is in the right. Until opposition is protected, therefore, there is no door through which reason can enter the affairs of government. But how is opposition protected? What makes it possible for people to agree to disagree?”
― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative