110+ Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes On Jesus, Critical And Satirical

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. He was known for his criticism of Soviet communism, his views on religion, and his strong support of traditional Christian values. He was also a popular television personality and wrote several books, including "Chronicles of Wasted Time". Following is our collection on famous quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge on jesus, critical, satirical.

Top 10 Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

1. We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.
2. The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.
3. What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.
4. Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
5. 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.
6. I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
7. Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
8. 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
9. Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
10. Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.

Malcolm Muggeridge Short Quotes

• Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
• Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
• How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me
• The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
• All new news is old news happening to new people
• There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.
• Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
• Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
• A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
• Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes About Jesus

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus. — Malcolm Muggeridge

As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes About Life

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

All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

One of the stupidest theories of Western life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes About World

There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I wouldn't have said that Anthony Eden was equipped by nature to deal with the situation in the world today. I would have said that he was portentous, sincere, honest and rather stupid. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I agree with... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The "pursuit of happiness" is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes About Happiness

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think. — Malcolm Muggeridge

As an old man...looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about...is suffering, affliction. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

People say that the Bible is a boring book...but they don't say that about Shakespeare, because the people who teach Shakespeare are zealous for Shakespeare. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

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

I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Secrecy is as essential to intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass or darkness to a spiritualist séance and must at all times be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which, I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle aged, and unseemly in the old. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product. — Malcolm Muggeridge

American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word... [it has] its own mysteries - this is my birth [control] pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! — Malcolm Muggeridge

An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think it [presidency of Dwight Eisenhower] came too late and I think that he is not on the wavelength of this dreadful time through which we're living. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Sex is the mysticism of materialism. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists... have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid.... I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I'm much too modest a person. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air-conditioned, neon-lighted, glass-and-chromium broiler-house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise, and watch over the developing embryo to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead. — Malcolm Muggeridge

What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I don't like seeing people angry. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

He was not only a bore; he bored for England. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of His purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed — Malcolm Muggeridge

The monarchical institution in England is immensely valuable. — Malcolm Muggeridge

It's very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that President [Dwight] Eisenhower was... did the most marvelous job in the war, not really a military job: a public relations job, and it was essential that there should be a public relations job done in the post that he had. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation. — Malcolm Muggeridge

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it's a drama — Malcolm Muggeridge

Supposing you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be! I would almost rather eliminate happiness. The world would be the most ghastly place because everything that corrects the tendency of this unspeakable little creature, man, to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He's bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false. — Malcolm Muggeridge

I think that any person who is commenting on public affairs is entitled to point out those dangers. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Life Lessons by Malcolm Muggeridge

1. Malcolm Muggeridge teaches the importance of having a sense of perspective and humility, and of being aware of the need to look beyond the surface of things.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of having a moral compass and of living a life of integrity and courage in the face of adversity.
3. Finally, he encourages us to be mindful of the brevity of life and to make the most of our time here on earth by living a life of purpose and meaning.