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In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

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
Ends
Priest
Great
Cycle
Clown
Cycles
Priests
Begins
Civilization
Buffoon
Artist
Buffoons

More quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

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Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
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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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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Like a prisoner awaiting his release, like a schoolboy when the end of term is near, like a migrant bird ready to fly south ... I long to be gone.
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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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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He was not only a bore he bored for England.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.
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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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 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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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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All new news is old news happening to new people
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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Tranquilizers to overcome angst, pep pills to wake us up, life pills to ensure blissful sterility. I will lift up my ears unto the pills whence cometh my help.
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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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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I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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I regard myself as a religious... the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
Malcolm Muggeridge