Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes - Page 5

Travel, of course, narrows the mind.

The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.

It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.

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.

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

I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.

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.

In my view, Jan Masaryk was thoroughly corrupt, who bumped himself off because he saw at last where his moral cowardice and ideological 'Playboyery' had led him. I vividly remember visiting him in Washington, fat, slightly tight, coming into the room looking like a broken-down butler with his master, the little Communist, Clementis, - and saying in a loud voice: 'Has anyone seen an Iron Curtain? I haven't.' Well, he has now.

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.

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.

Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word... [it has] its own mysteries - this is my birth [control] pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!

When St. Teresa of Avila says, 'Our life in this world is like a night in a second class hotel' I agree with her absolutely; and I think it's almost insulting to God and man to suggest that trivial events should give rise to deep concern on his part.

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?"

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.

One of the stupidest theories of Western 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.

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

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

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

Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass or darkness to a spiritualist séance and must at all times be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.

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

Sex is the mysticism of materialism.

I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead.

I'm much too modest a person.