In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.
Malcolm MuggeridgeTelevision was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
Malcolm MuggeridgeI agree with... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that.
Malcolm MuggeridgeIts 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 MuggeridgeAccumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.
Malcolm Muggeridge