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

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
Utterly
English
Humor
Serious
Thing
Practically

More quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

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It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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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Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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He was not only a bore he bored for England.
Malcolm Muggeridge