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?
Roger ScrutonRead
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.
Interpretation
True immigration issues can be resolved by fostering worldwide prosperity and freedom.
Roger Scruton's quote emphasizes that the root causes of immigration problems stem from lack of prosperity and freedom in certain regions. By improving economic conditions and ensuring individual liberties globally, the motivation for people to migrate would diminish, creating a more balanced and stable society.
In practice
During a conference on global development, one might quote Scruton to emphasize the importance of economic stability.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We see in order to move; we move in order to see.
In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.
Being harmless means being so strong, so empowered, that the idea of showing power through harm is not even a part of your consciousness.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which is the standard of excellence.
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