Quotes from Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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.

My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.

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

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Austerity has always made me happy, and its opposite, miserable. I find it strange that, knowing this, I should so often have inflicted upon myself the nausea of over-indulgence, and had to fight off the black dogs of satiety. Human beings, as Pascal points out, are peculiar in that they avidly pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction; gorge themselves with food which cannot nourish and with pleasures which cannot please. I am a prize example.

As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limits that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. The moment that limits are set... then the flavor is gone.

Men are as liable to pursue their own ruin as their own advantage. In

Most of the great universities of the West were founded with the conviction that theology is the queen of the disciplines. (...) Now, in the latter part of the twentieth century, that tradition has almost disappeared.

Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. (...) The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine.

Toate veÅŸtile noi sunt veÅŸti vechi care se întâmpl? unor oameni noi.

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

T]he whole character of secret Intelligence ... is that nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.

The strange and mysterious and highly amusing thing is that probably you would have very great difficulty in finding a single Marxist in the U.S.S.R. You would only find Marxists among left-wing Jesuits in the faculties of universities in the West, which is one of God's little jokes.

The early Christians had the great advantage of believing that the world would soon come to an end. That was a sort of miracle in their favour because it prevented them occupying their minds with irrelevant matters.

Religious enthusiasm among students is now an embarrassment; belief in the authority of the Bible and the deity of Jesus Christ is treated as naivety to be enlightened rather than life to be nourished. Scholars in the arts, letters, and sciences who show signs of Christian devotion are likely to be shrugged off as simplistic and eccentric.

Stalin knew that to get the Russian people to fight to the end with their backs to the wall, he needed something more than Marxist materialism. (...) What he did do was a characteristic Stalinist thing, he fetched the patriarch (of the Russian Orthodox Church) and one or two other prelates from the labour camp where they were languishing and brought them to the Kremlin and set them up in business again. It's one of those very significant incidents that tends to get forgotten.

I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.

Christendom has also retreated from freedom. In the much talk today about human rights, we forget that our human rights are derived from the Christian faith. In Christian terms every single human being, whoever he or she may be, sick or well, clever or foolish, beautiful or ugly, every single human being is loved of his Creator, who has, as the Gospels tell us, counted the hairs of his head.

Twentieth-century man has created his own fantasies through science (...). What fantastic achievements have thereby been made possible in the way of moving faster, growing richer, communicating more rapidly, mastering illnesses, and altogether overcoming the hazards of our earthly existence. But all the achievements have led to a true nature of our being: in other words, an alienation from God. If it were possible to live without God, it would not be worth living at all.

All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is a City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.

I've always thought that the Cold War when it was on was one of the most bizarre wars in history because wherever you had the Americans, they created Communists and wherever you had the Communists they created anti-Communists. So that really the Cold War became the question of whether the Americans would create more Communists than the Russians would create anti-Communists. At the present moment the Americans are doing rather well.

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.