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

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This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
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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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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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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
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Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
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Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
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Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.
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Higher education is booming in the United States the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
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Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
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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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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.
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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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I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.
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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.
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