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.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Advertising is seen as a negative force that creates constant desire for material goods.
In this quote, Malcolm Muggeridge critiques advertising as a pervasive influence that perpetuates consumerism by instilling an insatiable desire for possessions in people's minds. He suggests that the detrimental effects of advertising will be recognized by future generations as one of the significant moral challenges of his era, highlighting its role in shaping societal values and priorities toward materialism.
Themes
AdvertisingConsumerismDesireMaterialismSociety
In practice
Example use cases
A speech about the impacts of consumerism on modern society.
More from Malcolm Muggeridge
All quotes βThis 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.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
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.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
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.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.
Malcolm MuggeridgeRead
Similar quotes
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
Andrea DworkinRead
It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
John SteinbeckRead
But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold - and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.
N. T. WrightRead
The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
Allen GinsbergRead
What if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of his grave, and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
E. E. CummingsRead