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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #922
#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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1208
#3. I believe that the visit of the Queen to the United States is an admirable occasion to produce an historical, truthful, sincere, genuine analysis of how the British Monarchy evolved into its present situation.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #3226
#4. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #3471
#5. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #31580
#6. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #51749
#7. Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #59082
#8. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #75736
#9. One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #126666
#10. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #127694
#11. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #133005
#12. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #154977
#13. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #182962
#14. The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #191004
#15. Christianity ... sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #214552
#16. The monarchical institution in England is immensely valuable.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #226603
#17. There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #237323
#18. The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #243030
#19. I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #260317
#20. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #300072
#21. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #315780
#22. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #332914
#23. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #354938
#24. There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #388721
#25. Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #410191
#26. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #424092
#27. There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #463771
#28. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #471531
#29. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #500057
#30. The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #520473
#31. There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #521929
#32. He was not only a bore; he bored for England.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #538245
#33. I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #541880
#34. I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #553938
#35. I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #560236
#36. A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #566288
#37. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #580383
#38. Travel, of course, narrows the mind.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #582768
#39. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #590273
#40. In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #594249
#41. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #598473
#42. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #599254
#43. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #609559
#44. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #609780
#45. All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #625147
#46. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #627784
#47. All new news is old news happening to new people

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #632356
#48. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #656086
#49. I think that Sir Winston Churchill, in the period that the Germans occupied the Channel Ports, when the whole war hung in issue, fulfilled a role, which is as great as any role in our history.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #658938
#50. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #662432
#51. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #679224
#52. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #690338
#53. The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #692485
#54. No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

Brennan Manning

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #695922
#55. It's very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #698194
#56. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #713171
#57. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #726158
#58. Later the place was as deserted as Malcolm Muggeridge's Christmas party of fellow intellectuals.

William Donaldson

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #737018
#59. I don't like seeing people angry.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #739557
#60. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #785497
#61. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #799299
#62. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #804891
#63. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #904737
#64. Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #906940
#65. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #913620
#66. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #954402
#67. Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #981141
#68. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1015720
#69. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1032430
#70. [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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1057916
#71. Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1058527
#72. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1090861
#73. The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1091501
#74. How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1094564
#75. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1105598
#76. The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1113711
#77. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1122523
#78. For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1127436
#79. Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1152018
#80. The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1163418
#81. St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1222074
#82. Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1248032
#83. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1248438
#84. Only dead fish swim with the stream

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1250290
#85. Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1254948
#86. Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.

Sue Townsend

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1280788
#87. Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ... man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1317928
#88. As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1318231
#89. An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1323771
#90. Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1363344
#91. Malcolm Muggeridge who said that the only real Englishmen left in the world were to be found in India.

Ruskin Bond

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1367820
#92. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1411310
#93. My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1420511
#94. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1435468
#95. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1475226
#96. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1477302
#97. The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1496616
#98. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1498613
#99. 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

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1499301
#100. I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes #1513745

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top