René Rodriguez

“Dogs do not judge, and their love is unconditional only because it has no conception of conditions.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.”
― Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey

“People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“I have argued against the idea of animal rights elsewhere.5 My argument stems, not from a disrespect for animals, but from a respect for moral reasoning, and for the concepts – right, duty, obligation, virtue – which it employs and which depend at every point on the distinctive features of self-consciousness. But perhaps the greatest damage done by the idea of animal rights is the damage to animals themselves. Elevated in this way to the plane of moral consciousness, they find themselves unable to respond to the distinctions that morality requires. They do not distinguish right from wrong; they cannot recognise the call of duty or the binding obligations of the moral law. And because of this we judge them purely in terms of their ability to share our domestic ambience, to profit from our affection, and from time to time to reciprocate it in their own mute and dependent way. And it is precisely this that engenders our unscrupulous favouritism – the favouritism that has made it a crime in my country to shoot a cat, however destructive its behaviour, but a praiseworthy action to poison a mouse, and thereby to infect the food-chain on which so many animals depend.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition