Malcolm Muggeridge quotes - page 3

A scene that has often come into my mind, both sleeping and waking - I am standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go onstage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding, and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learnt are not in this play at all, but belong to quite a different one. Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what should I do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way onto the stage, and then look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor-boards. Alas he only signals helplessly to me and I realise of course that his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience, who begin to hiss and shout: "Get off the stage!”, "Let the play go on!”, "You're interrupting!”. (Malcolm Muggeridge)
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
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. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
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. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
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. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
One of the stupidest theories of Western life. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity. (Malcolm Muggeridge)
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. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
Civilisation --a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge
At the 20th Congress of British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, made [a] long report... Usual slogans spread about the building - 'Marxism is the science of working-class power'. Those present mostly lower middle class, few working class. On platform sat the Executive Committee, really deplorable faces. Unpleasant thought that in many parts of Europe, such people already in absolute power. View quote
Malcolm Muggeridge