Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.

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

Malcolm Muggeridge
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfilment.

Malcolm Muggeridge
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits — like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding — inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.

Malcolm Muggeridge
An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
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
There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ''the pursuit of happiness'' is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

Malcolm Muggeridge
A ready means of being cherished by the English is to adopt the simple expedient of living a long time. I have little doubt that if, say, Oscar Wilde had lived into his nineties, instead of dying in his forties, he would have been considered a benign, distinguished figure suitable to preside at a school prize-giving or to instruct and exhort scout masters at their jamborees. He might even have been knighted.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Good taste and humour…are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

Malcolm Muggeridge
There is a gulf between reality, which for Christians is Christ, and the world of fantasy that the media project.... Western people are being enormously misled by being induced to regard things on the screen as real, when actually they are fantasy. But, of course, God can use all things — even television, even you and me.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight.

Malcolm Muggeridge
As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone, he would not; Incarnate, he could and did.

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

Malcolm Muggeridge
Twilight of empire … a phrase which occurred to me long ago.

Malcolm Muggeridge
I doubt whether the Revolution has, in essentials, changed Russia at all. Reading Gogol, or Dostoevsky for that matter, one realizes how completely the Soviet regime has fallen back on to, and perhaps invigorated, the old Russia. Certainly there is much more of Gogol and Dostoievsky in the regime than there is of Marx.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained

Malcolm Muggeridge
Greene is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pursue conflict without.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.

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

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
Civilization – a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit vultures.

Malcolm Muggeridge
One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries — Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Late news was suicide of Jan Masaryk - In my view, Jan Masaryk was thoroughly corrupt, who bumped himself off because he saw at last where his moral cowardice and ideological 'Playboyery' had led him. I vividly remember visiting him in Washington, fat, slightly tight, coming into the room looking like a broken-down butler with his master, the little Communist, Clementis, [-] and saying in a loud voice -'Has anyone seen an Iron Curtain? I haven't.' Well, he has now.

Malcolm Muggeridge
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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
Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.

Malcolm Muggeridge
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