All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire. Malcolm Muggeridge More Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge More Quotes From Malcolm Muggeridge The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser. Malcolm Muggeridge imagination spiritual men The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists. Malcolm Muggeridge atheist doubt people 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 criticism essence thinking 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 taught suffering men 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. Malcolm Muggeridge brother beautiful love Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. Malcolm Muggeridge savages stones 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 simple mean school In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon. Malcolm Muggeridge clown artist civilization There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence. Malcolm Muggeridge irony serious spirit Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity. Malcolm Muggeridge vacuous gossip television American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive. Malcolm Muggeridge women athlete order 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 phrases happiness people Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age. Malcolm Muggeridge delinquency fraud age 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 consistency lasts feelings 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 errors glasses air 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 hate men thinking 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 should-have desire sex 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 impossible-situations too-late thinking 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 joy trying happiness The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Malcolm Muggeridge knowing mean reality
