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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

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
Exercise
Pascal
Pure
Licking
Seem
Retrospect
Called
Exercises
Seems
Gratification
Earth
Selfishness
Self
Selfish
Fantasy

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The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.
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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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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.
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Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
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I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
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Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
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The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
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One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
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I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama
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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?
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I doubt whether the Revolution has, in essentials, changed Russia at all. Reading Gogol, or Dostoevsky for that matter, one realizes how completely the Soviet regime has fallen back on to, and perhaps invigorated, the old Russia. Certainly there is much more of Gogol and Dostoievsky in the regime than there is of Marx.
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In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.
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