Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of His purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed

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

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass or darkness to a spiritualist séance and must at all times be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
Words, printed words, are words that have arisen in a human mind. They are connected with thought and with art. But photography or filming, is a completely different thing. It is machine made;... it is seeing with, not through, the eye; looking but not seeing.

Malcolm Muggeridge
To succeed pre-eminently in English public life it is necessary to conform either to the popular image of a bookie or of a clergyman; Churchill being a perfect example of the former, Halifax of the latter.

Malcolm Muggeridge
At the 20th Congress of British Communist Party,- usual slogans spread about the building-Marxism is the science of working-class power. Those present mostly lower middle class, few working class. On platform sat the Executve Committee, really deplorable faces. Unpleasant thought that in many parts of Europe, such people already in absolute power.

Malcolm Muggeridge
I wonder whether, in the history of all the civilisations that have ever been, a more insanely optimistic notion has ever been entertained than that you and I, mortal, puny creatures, may yet aspire, with God's grace and Christ's help, to be reborn into what St Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. Or if there was ever a more abysmally pessimistic one than that we, who reach out with our minds and our aspirations to the stars and beyond, should be able so to arrange our lives, so to eat and drink and fornicate and learn and frolic, that our brief span in this world fulfils all our hopes and desires.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
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
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great 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 that it has.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile....

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

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
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
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
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
The probability is, I suppose that the Monarchy has become a kind of ersatz religion. Chesterton once remarked that when people [cease] to believe in God they do not believe in nothing, but in anything.

Malcolm Muggeridge
The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.

Malcolm Muggeridge