Roger Scruton Quotes

“A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.”
― Roger Scruton

“It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have far-reaching influence over human affairs; but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.”
― Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

“The point of mediocre art is to inflame desire and destroy contentment because content people buy less. Good art is bad for business.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Very good things exhaust the senses through the mind, while mediocre things pummel the senses without ever reaching the mind.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Any society at war with the past will necessarily produce an endless tidal wave of cultural artifacts that are short-lived, for the longer any film or book or song lasts, the more adverse it is to progress.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Mediocre art not only hinders our ability to understand other people, it demands that we interpret our own lives through a laughably narrow range of emotions largely defined and curated by the unmarried, agnostic, pro-choice twentysomethings who now rule our culture.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Will Heaven Be Boring?: A Conversation About Beauty and Good Taste