Top 100 Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
#1. When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#2. I regard myself as a religious ... the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#3. The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#4. I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#5. In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#6. Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#7. Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word ... [it has] its own mysteries - this is my birth [control] pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!
Malcolm Muggeridge
#9. I think that the essence of a free and civilized society is that everything in it should be subject to criticism, that all forms of authority, should be treated with a certain reservation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#10. People say that the Bible is a boring book ... but they don't say that about Shakespeare, because the people who teach Shakespeare are zealous for Shakespeare.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#11. Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#12. It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#13. The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#14. Christianity ... sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#16. There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#17. The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#19. The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#20. American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#21. I simply make this point, that the monarchy in so far, as it is identified with what is, in my opinion, an obsolete class structure, is making a mistake, and the task of those who are responsible for the conduct of the monarchical institution is to detach it from that class structure.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#22. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#23. There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#24. Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#25. I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#26. I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#27. As an old man ... looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about ... is suffering, affliction.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#29. I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#30. I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#32. A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#33. I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#35. All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#36. In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#37. Like a prisoner awaiting his release, like a schoolboy when the end of term is near, like a migrant bird ready to fly south ... I long to be gone.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#38. I agree with ... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#39. I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#40. I think that President [Dwight] Eisenhower was ... did the most marvelous job in the war, not really a military job: a public relations job, and it was essential that there should be a public relations job done in the post that he had.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#41. All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#42. Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#44. Tranquilizers to overcome angst, pep pills to wake us up, life pills to ensure blissful sterility. I will lift up my ears unto the pills whence cometh my help.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#45. I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#46. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#47. The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#48. I don't think that it would make the slightest difference to life and to the aspects of life that interest me if we could go to the moon tomorrow, because I think what really makes life interesting is the big question "Why?"
Malcolm Muggeridge
#49. On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates
Malcolm Muggeridge
#51. I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#52. If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#53. The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#54. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies - is suffering, affliction.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#56. I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#57. The three most disastrous inventions of our time have been the birth control pill, the camera and nuclear weaponry. The first offers sex in terms of sterility, the second reality in terms of fantasy, and the third security in terms of destruction.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#58. Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#59. [T]he whole character of secret Intelligence ... is that nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#60. Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#61. There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs ... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#62. The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#63. How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me
Malcolm Muggeridge
#64. This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and ... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#65. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#66. For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die
Malcolm Muggeridge
#67. The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#68. St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#69. When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#72. As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#74. I think it [presidency of Dwight Eisenhower] came too late and I think that he is not on the wavelength of this dreadful time through which we're living.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#75. My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#76. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#77. The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#78. The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#79. The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#80. I am in a slight difficulty because I find myself in a minute minority there, in that this Sputnik didn't either interest me or frighten me, but that's because I don't, you see, believe that the circumstances of life are the important thing.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#81. One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#82. It's a sad thing about politics that most people get power too late, in that they differ from ladies of easy virtue who get their pleasures too early.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#83. Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#85. Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#86. Perhaps I should have been one [some sort of a professional religious]; I like to think a monk notable for his austerities, the voice of one crying in the wilderness; but more probably a tiresome Unitarian in Walsall who writes incessantly to the local paper.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#87. Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#88. Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#90. The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#91. I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#92. Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#93. What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#94. It has to be admitted that we English have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#95. History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#96. God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#97. Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#98. In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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