Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.
What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.
In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.
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.
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
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
Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
People say that the Bible is a boring book...but they don't say that about Shakespeare, because the people who teach Shakespeare are zealous for Shakespeare.
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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.
The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.
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.
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.
The only thing that really teaches one what life's about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies - is suffering, affliction.
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.
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.
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.
As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.
The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God.
In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
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.
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.
Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die
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.
Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.
In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.