Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

“Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century”

“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and fulfillment”

“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”

“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”

“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.”

“Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands - and all you can do is scratch it”

“Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time”

“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.”

“Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.”

People think of faith as being something that you dont really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument...He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

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

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the egos immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.

All new news is old news happening to new people

Theres a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

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.

When you reach your sixties you have to decide whether youre going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after youre sixty some degree of asceticism is inevitable.

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

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