Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

• Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
• Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
• People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.
• Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
• St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
• The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and fulfillment.
• 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 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 is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.
• Travel, of course, narrows the mind.
• 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.
• 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.
• Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
• Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
• One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.
• Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
• He was not only a bore; he bored for England.
• History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
• How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.
• 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.
• 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.
• My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
• Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
• Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.