The Ring of Truth Quotes

“And in answering that question he saw the inside of that bleak Viking world, the reality of love and compassion that all these hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods concealed. That”
― Roger Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung

“Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.”
― Roger Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung

“The ‘labour theory of value’, implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man’s nature that is inherently priced. By harnessing labour we replace the old relation between nature and need with the new relation between man and his products. The translation of use into exchange, of nature into commodities, of personal relations into the disguises assumed by human power – all these changes that mystify the world, placing a veil between human beings and their fulfilment, and surrounding them with the will-o’-the-wisps engendered by their own malleable appetites, had their origin in the trick, the deception, the ‘forging’ that had given one man the power to extract labour from another. To”
― Roger Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung

“In the German city-states there emerged thereafter a high culture, in which literature, philosophy, music, art and architecture were all spurred on by the rivalry of local sovereigns and the spread of Enlightenment ideas.”
― Roger Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung