Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
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The "pursuit of happiness" is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.
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late news was suicide of w: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.
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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.
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If you say to me that men are so made that the strongest kicks the weakest in the teeth and then the strongest survive, and go on to argue that if you apply this to economics you will get a happy society, you have done an irreparable wrong as we know, as we have seen.
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St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
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I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers.
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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.
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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!
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There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
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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.
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It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.
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I think that on the whole man would be living a more natural life if he were a vegetarian.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If I get to Heaven, which I very much doubt, I will ask of God just one thing, and that is to send Shakespeare back down to earth, and make him sit a University of Madras examination in Shakespeare, just for the pleasure of watching him failing the exam.
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Sex is the mysticism of materialism.
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How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.
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I am in a slight difficulty because I find myself in a minute minority there, in that this Sputnik didn't either interest me or frighten me, but that's because I don't, you see, believe that the circumstances of life are the important thing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tranquilizers to overcome angst, pep pills to wake us up, life pills to ensure blissful sterility. I will lift up my ears unto the pills whence cometh my help.
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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.