Top 100 Muggeridge's Quotes
#1. Later the place was as deserted as Malcolm Muggeridge's Christmas party of fellow intellectuals.
William Donaldson
#2. 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
#3. The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#4. How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me
Malcolm Muggeridge
#5. The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#6. 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
#7. Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#8. [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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#27. As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#34. My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#35. 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
#36. Malcolm Muggeridge who said that the only real Englishmen left in the world were to be found in India.
Ruskin Bond
#38. An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#39. To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.
Chester Elijah Branch
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#45. 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
#47. St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#48. The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#49. Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#50. For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die
Malcolm Muggeridge
#51. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#52. 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
#53. There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#54. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#60. There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#62. Christianity ... sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#63. The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#64. 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
#65. Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#92. I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#93. I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. 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
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