"Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyLawyers from EnglandComposers from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator (January 2014)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton (27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was a British philosopher, who worked as an academic, editor, publisher, barrister, journalist, broadcaster, countryside campaigner, novelist, and composer.
91 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Roger Scruton →
Related Quotes
"Attitudes to death go hand in hand with attitudes to sex. And it is in the sphere of sex that some of the greatest of…"
"It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikane…"
"A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the mos…"
"Race is at best an influence on behaviour, not the moral source of it. It is the individual alone who acts, and he al…"
"Of course, there are those — Sandel, Walzer and Dworkin, for example — who propose "communitarian" ways of thinking, …"
"An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tenden…"
"Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: ‘every object, whatever its origin, is,…"
"Schopenhauer was not the only one of Hegel’s opponents to rest his faith in the unsayable. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-18…"
"Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I…"
"A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an exten…"