Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.
— Roger Scruton
Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.
Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
The true face of religion belongs to the re-enchantment of our injured civilization; faith is a way of filling all the spiritual spaces in our damaged world with the vision of a loving God, the God described in the Qur'an as al-Rahman al-Rahim.
We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.
You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.
Conservative voters tend to believe that the 'climate change' agenda has been foisted upon us by an unaccountable lobby of politicised intellectuals.
Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
Conservatism is about freedom, yes. But it is also about the institutions and attitudes that shape the responsible citizen, and ensure that freedom is a benefit to us all. Conservatism is therefore also about the limits to freedom.
Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.
Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.
In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.
America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.
The real cure to immigration, obviously, is to make sure that there is prosperity around the world so that people don't have the motive. Not just prosperity, but freedom.
I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.
The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.
If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is.
We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.
Under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, it is an offence to stir up hatred towards religious and racial groups. 'Stirring up hatred' is an expression both loaded and undefined. Do I stir up hatred towards a religious group by criticising its beliefs in outspoken terms?
There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.
The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.
Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.
The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being.
Politics is a matter of day-to-day improvisation, and it often seems as though the major parties are guided only by the desire to stay in office and not by any philosophy that might justify their doing so.
Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.
What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.
America has this wonderful ability to recover from its own mistakes, which is why it's so hugely superior to China.
My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.
I am hostile to the idea that collective solutions have to be made by committees and then imposed top-down. I very much prefer bottom-up solutions.
The main aim of conservative politicians is to get through to the next election without being noticed. Nothing is more embarrassing to them than a person who claims not only to share their beliefs but also to be inclined to put them into practice.
Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to.
The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.
To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.
Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.
The world of art, I have suggested, is full of fakes. Fake originality, fake emotion and the fake expertise of the critics - these are all around us and in such abundance that we hardly know where to look for the real thing. Or perhaps there is no real thing?
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.
A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.
For Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment - the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs.
Like every other viable environmental policy, the search for clean energy begins at home.
In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.
It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.
My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.
Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century - they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It's only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.
