Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
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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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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 have a very great respect for Americans, and having been a correspondent in this country, and I believe that Americans are people who respond much better to facts and truthful, genuine speculation, than they do to purely, kind of phoney, adulation.
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I believe that the visit of the Queen to the United States is an admirable occasion to produce an historical, truthful, sincere, genuine analysis of how the British Monarchy evolved into its present situation.
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What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.
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Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
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The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
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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.
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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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The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile....
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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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Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.
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Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.
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Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
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Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
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The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.
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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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There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.
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When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.
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I think it [presidency of Dwight Eisenhower] came too late and I think that he is not on the wavelength of this dreadful time through which we're living.
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Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.
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Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained
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The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.