ActionScript-ToolBox: by Malcolm Muggeridge

ActionScript ToolBox
Quotes, Bios, and more!

Browse by:

Malcolm Muggeridge (Biography)

(0.21 seconds)

Other authors named Malcolm:

Author's popularity: 0
Vote:

If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the

icon to vote for, or the

icon to vote against them.

Popularity: -1 Vote:	An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	He was not only a bore; he bored for England.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	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.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

Biography

Malcolm Muggeridge (March 24, 1903–November 14, 1990) was a famous British journalist, author and media personality.

His father, H.T. Muggeridge, was a Labour councillor in Croydon, South London and, for a short time, a Member of Parliament. His mother was Annie Booler.

Malcolm attended Selwyn College at Cambridge University, graduating in 1924, and went to India to teach. While still a student he had taught for brief periods in 1920, 1922 and 1924 at the John Ruskin Central School, Croydon, where his father was Chairman of the Governors.

Returning to England in 1927, he married Katherine Dobbs (1903–1994), (also called Kathleen or Kitty) whose mother Rosalind Dobbs was a younger sister of Beatrice Webb. He worked as a supply teacher, before moving to teach in Egypt six months later. Here he also worked as a journalist for the first time.

They travelled to Moscow in 1932, where Malcolm was to be a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; at the time they were sympathetic to Stalin's Soviet regime. Their attitude soon changed. Malcolm investigated at first hand reports of the famine in Ukraine, travelling there and to the Caucasus. Reports he sent back to the Guardian, evading censorship, were not fully printed; furthermore, contradictory stories were being written by Walter Duranty. Having come into conflict with the paper's editorial policy, Muggeridge lost his job. He then wrote a novel Winter In Moscow (1934), satirzing Western journalists uncritical of the Stalin regime, and began a writing partnership with Hugh Kingsmill. Muggeridge's politics changed as he moved from a socialist, possibly fellow-travelling position, to a right-wing stance that was no less destructive in its criticism, as it was hard to locate in party-political terms.

He worked on other papers, including the Calcutta Statesman, Evening Standard, and Daily Telegraph. He was editor of Punch magazine from 1953 to 1957, a challenging appointment for one who claimed to have no sense of humour. He also became a popular BBC correspondent and interviewer (and also a figure of fun).

Muggeridge was also the "discoverer" of Mother Teresa, whom he first met in London in 1968. He told the world about her deeds through a book called Something Beautiful for God. He was well-known for his wit and profound writings ("Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream"). He wrote a two volume autobiography called Chronicles of Wasted Time.

In A Third Testament, he profiles seven spiritual thinkers who influenced his life: Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Having been a high-profile agnostic for most of his life, he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 79.