Top 100 Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Featured in: Individuality Quotes

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Featured in: Quotes About Facts

3. “What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

4. “We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

6. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

7. “People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

9. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

10. “There’s far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

11. “God, stay with me, let no word cross my lips that is not your word, no thoughts enter my mind that are not your thoughts, no deed ever be done or entertained by me that is not your deed.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

12. “The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of the health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

13. “For us humans, everything is permanent – until it changes, as we are immortal until we die.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

15. “The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

16. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

17. “I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

18. “In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

19. “Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

20. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

21. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

22. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

23. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

24. “All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

25. “The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

26. “Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

27. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

29. “In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

30. “The “pursuit of happiness” is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

31. “How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

32. “I think that once you’ve produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

33. “I think that the essence of a free and civilized society is that everything in it should be subject to criticism, that all forms of authority, should be treated with a certain reservation.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

34. “Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

35. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

37. “There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

38. “The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

39. “Jesus himself, even in his obscurity, dreaded the gathering of crowds, and where possible avoided them. Everything in Christianity that matters is from individual to individual; collectivities belong to the Devil, and so easily respond to his persuasion. The Devil is a demagogue and sloganeer; Jesus was, and is, concerned with individual souls, with the Living Word. What he gives us is truth carried on the wings of love, not slogans carried on the thrust of power.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

40. “Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

41. “Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

42. “An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

44. “Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

45. “The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

46. “I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

47. “I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it’s a drama.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

48. “Only dead fish swim with the stream.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

49. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

50. “The only people I’ve met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge