Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Reality, Men, Intellectual

  213 Copy quote

• What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Dark, Media, Civilization

  179 Copy quote

• 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

  Truth, Believe, Peculiar

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Christopher Ralling (1967). “Muggeridge through the microphone: B.B.C. radio and television”, Not Avail

  208 Copy quote

• We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  States, Educated, Imbecility

  195 Copy quote

• What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Christian, Men, Acting

  153 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Life, Positive

  127 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Looks, World

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1978). “A twentieth century testimony”, Thomas Nelson Publishers

  146 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Evil, Suffering

  155 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, Done, Deeds

  Malcolm Muggeridge (2005). “Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith”, p.215, Ignatius Press

  91 Copy quote

• 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

  Fists, Pleasure, God Is Dead

  171 Copy quote

• As an old man...looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about...is suffering, affliction.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Men, Suffering, Taught

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Promise, Drs

  Quoted in Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Geoffrey Barlow (1985)

  57 Copy quote

• Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Leadership, Swim, Individuality

  Radio Times 9 July 1964

  93 Copy quote

• People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Wisdom, Lying, Believe

  85 Copy quote

• Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Love Is, Men, Avid

  Malcolm Muggeridge (2005). “Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith”, p.152, Ignatius Press

  139 Copy quote

• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Vanity, Self

  133 Copy quote

• 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

  Jesus, Self, Might

  120 Copy quote

• In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Lying, News, Made

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1972). “The green stick”, Collins Publishers

  79 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Hate, Responsibility

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1987). “My life in pictures”

  51 Copy quote

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

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Mean, Reality, Knowing

  12 Copy quote

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

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Home, Earth, Disaster

  67 Copy quote

• 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

  Media, Monsters, Influence

  1976 Christ and theMedia,'Lecture1'.

  78 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Religious, Tumbling Down

  Malcolm Muggeridge (2005). “Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim”, p.61, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  58 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Bells, Tables

  43 Copy quote

• 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.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Happiness, Men, Want

  Malcolm Muggeridge, Ian Hunter (2003). “The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge”, p.225, Regent College Publishing

  9 Copy quote

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