In the traditional dances, physical contact was permitted in a way that it wasn't in everyday life. The electricity of physical contact has gone therefore from young people's lives.
— Roger Scruton
Although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal.
Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.
My father was a man of principle who found his principles confirmed in the unremitting failure which they brought on him.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
Ultimately, political order does not generate itself.
On the whole, I rather disapprove of cookbooks, except for the literary ones, like Elizabeth David's.
I'm a hate figure for a certain kind of half-educated politically correct person.
There is a chapter in 'Gentle Regrets' called 'Coming Home' which is really me expressing my later admiration for my father's public spirit.
I am a conservative thinker, well known as such, outspoken as such but reasonable in my view.
If you say something in advance - if you describe a problem as it arises, people always turn on you because they don't want to hear about it. But when it's too late to do anything, they will then turn around and say that you were right. That's human nature.
I've never been an optimist, but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised.
One must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they alone can surmount the problems which they create.
A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.
My life divides into three parts. In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting.
Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.
But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.
If there's a local reeling party, I might go to that.
When a woman cries date rape what she means is the whole thing went too quickly.
My little book of stories, 'Souls in the Twiligh,' may have to stand in for all the other things I have wanted to write in my retirement.
Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.
If you're going to have a free economy, one in which the ordinary citizen can dispose of his own income, you're going to have people who dispose of it in an anti-social way.
Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.
Fashion makes me laugh.
I've always loved horses.
What makes a politician accountable is not that there are millions of people who vote, but that there are procedures of government that force him to account for himself.
When I say there is no such crime as date rape I am saying what is true. There isn't a specific legal category of date rape and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong.
Certainly the multicultural activists in the Labour party and the universities wanted to destroy the old white Anglo-Saxon education system as they saw it, and produce something completely different - with no conception of what that completely different thing would be, of course.
What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.
Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.
It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.
The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a, to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom.
Given the right to - given the opportunity to vote, I voted for Brexit because I've never approved really of the European Union, I never approved of it because of its attempts to confiscate national sovereignty in all the issues that matter.
I love Viennese waltzes and polkas, and especially ceilidhs and old-fashioned formation dancing.
I've spent my life arguing for greater respect between men and women and anyone who takes the time to read my books or listen to my lectures will realise this.
My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.
I know ideals aren't realities, but they do influence reality - social, legal, political, cultural.
All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
To live with someone who likes you, and whose judgement you respect, because you love them, does make quite a difference, I find.
Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.
There has been throughout this country and throughout Europe really an attempt silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured and then demonised and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people.
Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.
I've always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don't just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.
Cameron's resignation really was the death knell of the Conservative Party as we knew it because that's something a proper Conservative politician cannot do: renounce leadership at the moment when it's needed.
The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.
A lot of the Qur'an is, frankly, cantankerous, vitriolic, man-hating stuff.
Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing.
