My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Opinions, Flattery, Agreement
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Belief
There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Happiness
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
—Malcolm Muggeridge
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Selfishness
Civilization—a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Civilization
Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Television
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Prophecy, Vision
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Retirement
People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Lies
Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Humor
Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Sex
This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and… if I think of human beings I’ve known and of my own life, such as it is, I can’t recall any case of pain which didn’t, on the whole, enrich life.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Pain
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Youth
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Conformity
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Sex
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 tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Imagination
Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Media
One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Old Age
The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they’re liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can’t be realized.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Heaven
All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. Theart of life is to get the message.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Sex
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.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Bores, Aspirations, Alcohol, Boredom
There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
There’s nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Agreement
One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Evolution
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
—Malcolm Muggeridge
Topics: Advertising
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
- Evelyn Waugh British Novelist, Satirist
- C. P. Scott British Journalist, Editor
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- Edwin Arnold English Poet
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Katharine Whitehorn English Journalist
- Heywood Broun American Journalist
- Anthony Powell English Novelist
- George Augustus Henry Sala British Journalist
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