Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
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People say that the Bible is a boring book...but they don't say that about Shakespeare, because the people who teach Shakespeare are zealous for Shakespeare.
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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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St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
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Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.
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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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One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
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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.
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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.
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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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How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.
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I think that the essence of a free and civilized society is that everything in it should be subject to criticism, that all forms of authority, should be treated with a certain reservation.
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I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.
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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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In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.
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I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.
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What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.
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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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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.
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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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All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.