Malcolm Muggeridge: Quotes about time

“I can say with truth that I have never, even in times of greatest preoccupation with carnal, worldly and egotistic pursuits, seriously doubted that our existence here is related in some mysterious way to a more comprehensive and lasting existence elsewhere; that somehow or other we belong to a larger scene than our earthly life provides, and to a wider reach of time than our earthly allotment of three score years and ten…It has never been possible for me to persuade myself that the universe could have been created, and we, homo sapiens, so-called, have, generation after generation, somehow made our appearance to sojourn briefly on our tiny earth, solely in order to mount the interminable soap opera, with the same characters and situations endlessly recurring, that we call history. It would be like building a great stadium for a display of tiddly-winks, or a vast opera house for a mouth-organ recital. There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe than just getting through the days of our life as best we may; some other destiny than merely using up such physical, intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been vouchsafed us. This, anyway, has been the strongly held conviction of the greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists, through the Christian centuries, who have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid, and that the great drama of the Incarnation which embodies it, is indeed the master drama of our existence. To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed, would seem to me to be untenable; and anyway 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, Darwin, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (1988)

Life , Truth , Fools , Way

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

Reality , Time

“One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency. The contrast is well exemplified in two exact contemporaries — Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir; both highly intelligent and earnestly disposed. In all the fearful moral dilemmas of our time, Simone Weil never once went astray, whereas Simone de Beauvoir, with I am sure the best of intentions, has found herself aligned with apologists for some of the most monstrous barbarities and falsehoods of history.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

"A Knight of the Woeful Countenance" in The World of George Orwell (1972) edited by Miriam Gross, p. 167

Truth , Fear , History , Intelligence

“Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge http://books.google.com/books?id=vI0uAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Few+men+of+action+have+been+able+to+make+a+graceful+exit+at+the+appropriate+time%22&pg=PA239#v=onepage (1966)

Men , Time

“We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

The Great Liberal Death Wish, lecture at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, USA, March 1979. Transcript in Imprimis http://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/1979_05_Imprimis.pdf May 1979 (pdf).

Food , Fools , Way , Imagination