Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
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There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
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Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass or darkness to a spiritualist seance and must at all times be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.
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Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.
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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.
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When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
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Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
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I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
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The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
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American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.
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I regard myself as a religious... the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.
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The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.
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The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
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I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
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A ready means of being cherished by the English is to adopt the simple expedient of living a long time. I have little doubt that if, say, Oscar Wilde had lived into his nineties, instead of dying in his forties, he would have been considered a benign, distinguished figure suitable to preside at a school prize-giving or to instruct and exhort scout masters at their jamborees. He might even have been knighted.
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If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.
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In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.
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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, a
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All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.
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All new news is old news happening to new people.
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I think that President [Dwight] Eisenhower was... did the most marvelous job in the war, not really a military job: a public relations job, and it was essential that there should be a public relations job done in the post that he had.
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I wouldn't have said that Anthony Eden was equipped by nature to deal with the situation in the world today. I would have said that he was portentous, sincere, honest and rather stupid.
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I'm much too modest a person.
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I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.
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There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see.