Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge, was a British journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. As a young man, Muggeridge was a left-wing sympathiser but he later became a forceful anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy. He is credited with bringing Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West and stimulating debate about Catholic theology. In his later years he was outspoken on religious and moral issues. He wrote two volumes of...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth24 March 1903
Malcolm Muggeridge quotes about
There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.
I don't think that it would make the slightest difference to life and to the aspects of life that interest me if we could go to the moon tomorrow, because I think what really makes life interesting is the big question "Why?"
Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.
The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.
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.
When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
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.
In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.
The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
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.
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.