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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 -
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.
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 -
I think that on the whole man would be living a more natural life if he were a vegetarian.
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 -
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
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I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
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 -
This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
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.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
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 -
People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument... He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
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 -
There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
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 -
One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
Malcolm Muggeridge -
Sex is the mysticism of materialism.
Malcolm Muggeridge