Malcolm Muggeridge cytaty

strona 2

„Humor to praktycznie jedyna rzecz, którą Anglicy traktują całkiem serio.”

„Prasa to sumienie z papieru.”

„Dziś wydaje się nadzwyczajne, iż surowe na pozór wymagania Jezusa dostarczyć mogły tyle radości, a powrót do pogańskiej swobody obyczajów pogrąża zachodnią cywilizację w mroku przygnębienia i nudy. Czy Skandynawia rozbrzmiewa śmiechem szczęścia? Czy brodatą i rozebraną z biustonosza rewolucję kalifornijską zdobią wawrzyny uśmiechu, czy ich taneczny korowód przetacza się przez dzikie doliny? Czy uniwersyteckie dziedzińce dźwięczą radosną pieśnią i skrzą się dowcipem? Nie wydaje mi się. Choć nie potrafię wyjaśnić, doświadczyłem i wiem, że świat porzucony zaczyna lśnić wszystkimi swymi barwami, kształtami i dźwiękami jak nigdy przedtem; oczy zwrócone ku niebu widzą każdą tkankę ciała, fałdę sukni, całe ziemskie piękno tak wyraźnie, jak nigdy nie potrafi nikt, kto zwrócił wzrok ku ziemi; i że miłość, która wolna jest od żądzy posiadania, miłość o pustych rękach, wolna od żądła egoizmu i od żaru krwi, błyszczy jak wschodzące słońce, przepełniające świat ciepłem, światłem, zachwyceniem.”

“Greene 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 pursue conflict without.”

“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.”

“I wonder whether, in the history of all the civilisations that have ever been, a more insanely optimistic notion has ever been entertained than that you and I, mortal, puny creatures, may yet aspire, with God’s grace and Christ’s help, to be reborn into what St Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. Or if there was ever a more abysmally pessimistic one than that we, who reach out with our minds and our aspirations to the stars and beyond, should be able so to arrange our lives, so to eat and drink and fornicate and learn and frolic, that our brief span in this world fulfils all our hopes and desires.”

“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 freedom of being an individual, in a collectivity, of basing one's life on love, as distinct from power, of seeking the good of others rather than nourishing one's own ego. That was liberation. And the Chief Inquisitor, who speaks for every dictator, every millionaire, every ideologue that's ever been, says we can't have it. Go away. Stay away.”

“The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth.”

“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [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 the 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.”