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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
Form
Forms
Certain
Criticism
Everything
Subject
Think
Essence
Thinking
Authority
Reservation
Subjects
Reservations
Society
Civilized
Free
Treated

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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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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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I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.
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I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.
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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.
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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.
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An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
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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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The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.
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My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
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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.
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Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
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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.
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The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile.
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When St. Teresa of Avila says, 'Our life in this world is like a night in a second class hotel' I agree with her absolutely and I think it's almost insulting to God and man to suggest that trivial events should give rise to deep concern on his part.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
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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.
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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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Sex is the mysticism of materialism.
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