Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Malcolm Muggeridge