Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge, was a British journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. As a young man, Muggeridge was a left-wing sympathiser but he later became a forceful anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy. He is credited with bringing Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West and stimulating debate about Catholic theology. In his later years he was outspoken on religious and moral issues. He wrote two volumes of...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth24 March 1903
In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me
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.
I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.
[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.
There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see.
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
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.