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It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

Malcolm Muggeridge

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Malcolm Muggeridge
Age: 87 †
Born: 1903
Born: March 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 14
Autobiographer
Editor
Journalist
Writer
London
England
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge
Place
Holds
Trying
Discovered
Make
English
Life
Laughter
Jokes
Somber
Laugh
Haunted
Laughing
Wretched
Lost
Occupation

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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.
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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.
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The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none left over for works of imagination of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment.
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My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
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An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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The three most disastrous inventions of our time have been the birth control pill, the camera and nuclear weaponry. The first offers sex in terms of sterility, the second reality in terms of fantasy, and the third security in terms of destruction.
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We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.
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The only thing that really teaches one what life's about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies - is suffering, affliction.
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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.
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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.
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It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.
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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.
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It has to be admitted that we English have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it.
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All new news is old news happening to new people
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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.
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The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
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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.
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Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.
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The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile.
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