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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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Malcolm Muggeridge
Age: 87 †
Born: 1903
Born: March 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 14
Autobiographer
Editor
Journalist
Writer
London
England
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge
Decide
Degrees
Reach
Ascetic
Working
Asceticism
Whether
Sixties
Words
Sixty
Going
Inevitable
Degree

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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In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates
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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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
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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A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
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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Higher education is booming in the United States the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.
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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When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.
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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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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It's a sad thing about politics that most people get power too late, in that they differ from ladies of easy virtue who get their pleasures too early.
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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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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.
Malcolm Muggeridge