Quotes by Malcolm Muggeridge

“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.”

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

“Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms like a chaste whore.”

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

“There is no such thing as darkness only a failure to see.”

“I realise that you don't want to know what is going on in Russia or let your readers know... I feel utterly disgusted... The hypocrisy of it all, the salesmanship, the Kinglsey-Martin-Bernard-Shaw-...”

“There were soldiers everywhere... They were well fed and the civilian population was obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as, for instance, most Oriental pe...”

“On the platform a group of peasants were standing in military formation five soldiers armed with rifles guarding them. There were men and women, each carrying a bundle. Somehow, lining them up in m...”

“All the evidence goes to show that the conditions in the Upper, Middle, and Lower Volga districts are as bad as in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine; in Western Siberia they are little, if at all,...”

“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 s...”

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

“I initially became a vegetarian for this reason: I have a great hatred for the treatment of animals in what we call factory farms. That, I felt, was one of the most horrible and bestial things, and...”

“[Have you ever visited the factory farms?] Well, I have seen them. I've seen the chicken ones, which are quite horrifying. And I have put my head in others. But the whole thing nauseates me more th...”

“I think that if men treat animals badly, they will almost certainly treat human beings badly in due course.”

“I think that on the whole man would be living a more natural life if he were a vegetarian.”

“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 most...”

“Greene, we agreed, is a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is conflict within him, and therefore he is liable to pur...”

“I doubt whether the Revolution has, in essentials, changed Russia at all. Reading Gogol, or Dostoevsky for that matter, one realizes how completely the Soviet regime has fallen back on to, and perh...”

“Late news was suicide of Jan Masaryk... In my view, Jan Masaryk was thoroughly corrupt, who bumped himself off because he saw at last where his moral cowardice and ideological 'Playboyery' had led ...”

“Freedom is a mystical truth — it's expressed best in The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter when the Grand Inquisitor confronted the returned Christ. The freedom that Christ gave the world was the fre...”