Malcolm Muggeridge B. 1903 – D. 1990
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist and satirist. His father was a prominent socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism but after living in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, he became a forceful anti-communist. – Wikipedia
Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes:
“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
“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
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing…by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“What will finally destroy us is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.” – 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.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“The greatest artists, saints, philosophers, and, until quite recent times, scientists… have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid… I’d rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake, and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“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 a hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“[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.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“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
“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.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
“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
“It’s very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“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
“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he (Kierkegaard) pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
“The best example of the incarnate presence of Christ to withstand worldly power is Solzhenitsyn, the most distinguished contemporary Russian writer. […] He realized that we can be free only if we are free in our souls; that a man in a prison camp who has learned to be free inside himself is freer than the freest man, whether in the so-called free world of the West or in the ideological Marxist world of the East.
One chapter in his second Gulag book is called ‘The Ascent’. In that chapter, he describes this process of illumination in a classic document of what it means to be liberated, to be free through Christ. St. Paul called it ‘the glorious freedom of the children of God’, the only authentic freedom that exists in this mortal life.” – Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom
The Religion That Started in a Hat 