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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

More quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

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Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
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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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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How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me
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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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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Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
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
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One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
Malcolm Muggeridge
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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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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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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 like seeing people angry.
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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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.
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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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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History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
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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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