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
Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.
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.
[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.
Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.
like trying a man's finger for having pulled the trigger of a gun which murdered someone.
For as we abolish the ills and pains of the flesh we multiply those of the mind, so by the time mankind are finally delivered from disease and decay - all pasteurised, their genes counted and re-arranged, filled with new replaceable plastic organs, a
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.
The first thing I remember about the world...is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which is at once the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.
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.
I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.