15 quotes
To paraphrase: Everything happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.
Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (1972)
Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge (1966)
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth.
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.
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 pursue conflict without.
Like It Was: The Diaries (1981)
I think that if men treat animals badly, they will almost certainly treat human beings badly in due course.
Interview with Rynn Berry (1979)
I think that on the whole man would be living a more natural life if he were a vegetarian.
Interview with Rynn Berry (1979)
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.
I hate government. I hate power. I think that man's existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.
If I get to Heaven, which I very much doubt, I will ask of God just one thing, and that is to send Shakespeare back down to earth, and make him sit a University of Madras examination in Shakespeare, just for the pleasure of watching him failing the exam.
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 an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
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 perhaps invigorated, the old Russia. Certainly there is much more of Gogol and Dostoievsky in the regime than there is of Marx.
Like It Was: The Diaries (1981)