Roger Scruton Quotes

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

I think it's one of my favourite theatres ever, so quirky and wonderful and steeped in history. The space is wonderful and the acoustics are brilliant.

Architecture has joined the world of fashion, but fashion is passing and architecture is timeless.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

It's very atmospheric. It's not a building that is a severe statement in the skyline. We need the height; otherwise, the building almost disappears because it is so slender.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy... which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.

The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people.

The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.

Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs.

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.

I remember in my very first fitting, costume designer Patricia Norris gave me a garment with these intricate stitches - stitches over stitches, because it had been repaired so many times. Once I put it on, she told me that it belonged to an actual slave woman. My heart just stopped. Each one of the stitches had a story, you know. Just recognizing this period I was going to be dancing with was a "come to Jesus" moment.

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

In architecture, the demand was no longer for box-like forms, but for buildings that have something to say to the human emotions.

Paris is the fountain-head of European civilisation, as Gomukhi is of the Ganga.

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.

History is remembered by its art, not its war machines.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.