Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes (38 Quotes)




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

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

    People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.


    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.


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

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

    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.

    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


    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.

    Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

    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.

    My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.



    How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.

    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

    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.

    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.


    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.


    Civilisation --a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

    The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.

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

    Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

    For as we abolish the ills and pains of the flesh we multiply those of the mind, so by the time mankind are finally delivered from disease and decay - all pasteurised, their genes counted and re-arranged, filled with new replaceable plastic organs, a

    St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and fulfillment.


    Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

    The first thing I remember about the world...is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which is at once the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.


    More Malcolm Muggeridge Quotations (Based on Topics)


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