Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge (English Journalist)

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90,) fully Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge, was an English journalist, social critic, and satirist. He was a famous interviewer, panelist, and documentarian on British television.

Born in Croydon, London, Muggeridge was the son of H. T. Muggeridge, a leading socialist politician who served as an early Labour Member of Parliament. Malcolm lectured at the Egyptian University in Cairo (1927–30,) then joined the Manchester Guardian (1930–33,) working as their Moscow correspondent. He was also assistant editor of the Calcutta Statesman (1934–35) and on the editorial staff of the Evening Standard.

Muggeridge served with the Intelligence Corps during World War II and earned the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. He worked with The Daily Telegraph (1946–52) and was editor of Punch (1953–57.)

As a television reporter and interviewer, Muggeridge made frequent contributions to Panorama (1953–60.) In his own series, Appointment With? (1960–61) and Let Me Speak (1964–65,) he examined the significant figures of the day and challenged minorities to justify their beliefs.

An outspoken and contentious iconoclast, Muggeridge targeted liberalism and other features of modern life with his stinging wit and graceful prose. A controversial Rector of Edinburgh University (1967–68,) he quit over student liberalism and promiscuity.

An avowed atheist, Muggeridge became a Roman Catholic at age 79. Following television appearances include the autobiographical Muggeridge Ancient and Modern (1981.) Among his many books are The Earnest Atheist (1936,) Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes (1966,) Chronicle of Wasted Time (1982,) and Conversion: A Spiritual Journey (1988.)

Gregory Wolfe wrote the acclaimed Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography (1995.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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