The Best Malcolm Muggeridge quotes

One of the stupidest theories of Western life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second–class hotel. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society–in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word… [it has] its own mysteries–this is my birth [control] pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! — Malcolm Muggeridge

A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The ‘pursuit of happiness’ is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The only people I’ve met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists. — Malcolm Muggeridge

There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow–humans. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It’s very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I’m much too modest a person. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Travel, of course, narrows the mind. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It has to be admitted that we English have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It’s a sad thing about politics that most people get power too late, in that they differ from ladies of easy virtue who get their pleasures too early. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill–equipped to deal. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge