Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes & Sayings

As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did. — Malcolm Muggeridge

So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over
a weary, battered old brontosaurus
and became extinct. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Supposing you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be! I would almost rather eliminate happiness. The world would be the most ghastly place because everything that corrects the tendency of this unspeakable little creature, man, to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He's bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In the 19th century, the English were loathed. Every memoir that you read of that period, indicates the loathing that everybody felt for the English, the only difference between the English and Americans, in this respect, is the English rather liked being loathed and the Americans apparently dislike it intensely. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists ... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid ... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman. — 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

For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die — Malcolm Muggeridge

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The three most disastrous inventions of our time have been the birth control pill, the camera and nuclear weaponry. The first offers sex in terms of sterility, the second reality in terms of fantasy, and the third security in terms of destruction. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead. — 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

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of His purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that Sir Winston Churchill, in the period that the Germans occupied the Channel Ports, when the whole war hung in issue, fulfilled a role, which is as great as any role in our history. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Perhaps I should have been one [some sort of a professional religious]; I like to think a monk notable for his austerities, the voice of one crying in the wilderness; but more probably a tiresome Unitarian in Walsall who writes incessantly to the local paper. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old. — 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 doubt whether the Revolution has, in essentials, changed Russia at all. Reading Gogol, or Dostoevsky for that matter, one realizes how completely the Soviet regime has fallen back on to, and perhaps invigorated, the old Russia. Certainly there is much more of Gogol and Dostoievsky in the regime than there is of Marx. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

I agree with ... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I don't think that it would make the slightest difference to life and to the aspects of life that interest me if we could go to the moon tomorrow, because I think what really makes life interesting is the big question "Why?" — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — 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

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

Jesus himself, even in his obscurity, dreaded the gathering of crowds, and where possible avoided them. Everything in Christianity that matters is from individual to individual; collectivities belong to the Devil, and so easily respond to his persuasion. The Devil is a demagogue and sloganeer; Jesus was, and is, concerned with individual souls, with the Living Word. What he gives us is truth carried on the wings of love, not slogans carried on the thrust of power. — 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

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

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained — Malcolm Muggeridge

We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Earthly authority displays itself in giving orders, in magnificent apparel, in hordes of servitors, in sycophantic addresses; the authority of Jesus disposes of is, by contrast, spiritual, and expresses itself in serving, not being served, in seeking to be the least instead of the greatest, the last instead of the first, in finding wisdom in the innocence of children and truth in the foolishness of men rather than in those who pass for being sagacious and experienced in the world's ways. When we want to adulate men, we say they are godlike; but when God became Man, it was in the lineaments of the least of men. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence. — 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

One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history. — Malcolm Muggeridge

People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument ...
He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment. — 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

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

The monarchical institution in England is immensely valuable. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience. — 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

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. — Malcolm Muggeridge

When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing. — 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

When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power ... Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life! — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

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

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

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile ... — Malcolm Muggeridge

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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 — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious. — Malcolm Muggeridge

[T]he whole character of secret Intelligence ... is that nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it. — Malcolm Muggeridge

There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I believe that the visit of the Queen to the United States is an admirable occasion to produce an historical, truthful, sincere, genuine analysis of how the British Monarchy evolved into its present situation. — 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

I am in a slight difficulty because I find myself in a minute minority there, in that this Sputnik didn't either interest me or frighten me, but that's because I don't, you see, believe that the circumstances of life are the important thing. — 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

How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me — 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

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

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

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

Christianity ... sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation. — 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

Only dead fish swim with the stream — Malcolm Muggeridge

All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire. — Malcolm Muggeridge