Quotes from Malcolm Muggeridge

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

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.

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

I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

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

I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

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

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.