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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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Malcolm Muggeridge
Age: 87 †
Born: 1903
Born: March 24
Died: 1990
Died: November 14
Autobiographer
Editor
Journalist
Writer
London
England
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge
Thinking
Authority
Reservation
Subjects
Reservations
Society
Civilized
Free
Treated
Form
Forms
Certain
Criticism
Everything
Subject
Think
Essence

More quotes by 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.
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As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us As God alone, He would not Made flesh, He could and did.
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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.
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In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
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Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
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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.
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In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.
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The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.
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Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
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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.
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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.
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I don't like seeing people angry.
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The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.
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He was not only a bore he bored for England.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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All new news is old news happening to new people
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Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
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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My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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I don't think that it would make the slightest difference to life and to the aspects of life that interest me if we could go to the moon tomorrow, because I think what really makes life interesting is the big question Why?
Malcolm Muggeridge