Malcolm Muggeridge

“One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.”

“All new news is old news happening to new people”

“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.”

“Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.”

“Travel, of course, narrows the mind.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“There's 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 orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“[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 ego's 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.”