“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
“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 (1903-1990)
“All new news is old news happening to new people”
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
“Organized religion kills the living beauty of God.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
“For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die”
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility."
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
"What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God."
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false."
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"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 (1903-1990)
"One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up."
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
"Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."
― Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)