Top 100 Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Organized religion kills the living beauty of God.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

52. “I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

53. “Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

54. “I’m much too modest a person.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

55. “The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

56. “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

57. “Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

58. “Travel, of course, narrows the mind.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

59. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

60. “I don’t like seeing people angry.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

61. “The only thing that really teaches one what life’s about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies – is suffering, affliction.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

62. “On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing ‘Abide with Me’ in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

63. “The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

64. “The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

65. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

66. “I think that in free societies, and we’re constantly talking about living in free societies, aren’t we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

67. “I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

68. “Higher education is booming in the United States; the Gross National Mind is mounting along with the Gross National Product.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

69. “I wouldn’t have said that Anthony Eden was equipped by nature to deal with the situation in the world today. I would have said that he was portentous, sincere, honest and rather stupid.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

70. “The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

72. “Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

73. “I believe that the visit of the Queen to the United States is an admirable occasion to produce an historical, truthful, sincere, genuine analysis of how the British Monarchy evolved into its present situation.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

74. “I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

75. “In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

76. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

77. “I have a very great respect for Americans, and having been a correspondent in this country, and I believe that Americans are people who respond much better to facts and truthful, genuine speculation, than they do to purely, kind of phoney, adulation.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

79. “I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

80. “Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

81. “I think that Sir Winston Churchill, in the period that the Germans occupied the Channel Ports, when the whole war hung in issue, fulfilled a role, which is as great as any role in our history.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

82. “A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

84. “One of the stupidest theories of Western life.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

85. “I am in a slight difficulty because I find myself in a minute minority there, in that this Sputnik didn’t either interest me or frighten me, but that’s because I don’t, you see, believe that the circumstances of life are the important thing.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

86. “It’s very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

87. “It’s a sad thing about politics that most people get power too late, in that they differ from ladies of easy virtue who get their pleasures too early.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

88. “As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limits that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. The moment that limits are set... then the flavor is gone.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

— Malcolm Muggeridge

90. “Tranquilizers to overcome angst, pep pills to wake us up, life pills to ensure blissful sterility. I will lift up my ears unto the pills whence cometh my help.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

91. “All of us admire people we don’t like and like people we don’t admire.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

92. “Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

93. “When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

94. “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?””

— Malcolm Muggeridge

95. “Civilization – a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

96. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

97. “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.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

98. “I think Queen Elisabeth II is a charming woman.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

99. “As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge

100. “The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.”

— Malcolm Muggeridge