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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

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
Drafts
Humor
Society
Individual
Shuns
Decrepit

More quotes by 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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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.
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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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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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One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
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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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!
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
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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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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I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Malcolm Muggeridge