Quotes from 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.

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

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.

The point is, could God pass an examination in Theology?

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.

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

Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

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

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.

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

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

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.

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

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

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.

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

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

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

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.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to

All new news is old news happening to new people

People think of faith as being something that you don't 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.

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.

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.