Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
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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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The three most disastrous inventions of our time have been the birth control pill, the camera and nuclear weaponry. The first offers sex in terms of sterility, the second reality in terms of fantasy, and the third security in terms of destruction.
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I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman.
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Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
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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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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
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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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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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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 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 beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama.
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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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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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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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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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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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I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.
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One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
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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.
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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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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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Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight. The vacancy which afflicts them in private momentarily lifts when, oncemore, they feel the eyes of an audience upon them. Their old passion for holding the centre of the stage guides their uncertain footsteps to where the footlights shine, and summons up a wintry smile when the curtain rises.
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What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.