The opening paragraph of Scruton's introduction to the Homer Sykes book Hunting With Hounds

"Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions

Peter These quotations are taken from the eighth chapter, The Totalitarian Temptation, of Scruton's 2006 book Arguments for Conservatism.

"There is a kind of addiction to unreality that informs the most destructive forms of optimism: a desire to cross out reality, as the premise from which practical reason begins, and to replace it with a system of compliant illusions" The Uses of Pessimism

"In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not

"The myth animates the world by projecting intention and desire into natural processes, by describing nature as a thinking, feeling thing, and thereby lifting the natural to the supernatural. In myth we seem to confront a story which asks to be believed, without being believed as

Ferenc Hörcher has started me on an intellectual journey that I've really been enjoying.

"The high culture of our civilisation contains knowledge which is far more significant than anything that can be absorbed from the channels of popular communication. This is a hard belief to justify, and a harder one to live with; indeed, it has nothing to recommend it, apart

"When we sit on a horse we are judged as one half of a centaur; hence our concern with appearances receives an added boost from these animals who mimic our social instincts. We enter the field with a share of their excitement, returning to our tribal existence as they return to

"Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind all but inevitably passes. But it is also a stage in which we can become arrested. Orwell noticed this in the English intellectuals of his day" Where We Are: The State of Britain Now

"Our consumer society puts usefulness first, and beauty is no better than a side-effect. Since art is useless it doesn't matter what you read, what you look at, what you listen to. We are besieged by messages on every side, titillated, tempted by appetite – never addressed – and

"The social drinking of wine, during or after a meal, and in full cognizance of its delicate taste and evocative aura, seldom leads to drunkenness, and yet more seldom to loutish behaviour. The drink problem that we witness in British cities stems from our inability to pay

"Ordinary conservatives – and many, possibly most, people fall into this category – are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist, or racist. Just by being the thing they are they offend against the new norms of inclusiveness and

"The revolutionary consciousness lives by abstract ideas, and regards people as the material upon which to conduct its intellectual experiments. The charm of the Marxist theory is in describing revolutionary transformation as inevitable, and as originating wholly outside the

"The revolutionary lays claim to a constituency: but this constituency is removed from the real world by his very assumption of the right to speak for it. Thus any member of the working class who speaks out against the revolutionary communist becomes a class 'traitor'. As Lukács

"Only in the course of the nineteenth century, and in the wake of Hegel's posthumously published lectures on aesthetics, did the topic of art come to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics. And this change was part of the great shift in educated

"If anything can count as art, what is the point or the merit in achieving that label? All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people look at some things, others look at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches