Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that in the absence of a higher moral authority, individuals will seek to fill the void with either a desire for power or pleasure.
Malcolm Muggeridge's quote reflects on the consequences of a society that is devoid of belief in God. He argues that when divine guidance is removed, humanity is left to choose between two extreme forces: megalomania, which is the obsession with power and control, or erotomania, which is the pursuit of pleasure and indulgence. The stark contrast between figures like Hitler and Hugh Hefner illustrates how different manifestations of this void can shape human behavior and societal values, ultimately questioning what replaces spiritual and ethical frameworks in a secular world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about secularism and its effects on today's society.
More from Malcolm Muggeridge
All quotes →This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.
I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.
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.
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Similar quotes
Christian community is like the Christian's sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature.
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.
One day old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had declared that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't looking. 'Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, 'or burn!' They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.
Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels