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.
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that in the 20th century, many people turned to sex as a form of fulfillment or worship, replacing traditional religions.
Malcolm Muggeridge's quote indicates that in the modern era, sex has taken on a significance akin to religion for many individuals. It implies that the search for meaning, purpose, and transcendence, which was historically sought through faith and spirituality, has shifted to a more carnal and physical form of expression, highlighting a cultural change in values and priorities since the 20th century.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about modern cultural values, this quote could illustrate the shift from traditional beliefs to a focus on physical pleasure.
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.
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
Our environments shape the way we see ourselves. If you have been condemned to live in an area that is pretty evidently a rat-run, then sooner or later you're gonna come to the conclusion that you're a rat.
Nobody ever fails in Yoga....It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end. _x000D_ When one is fully matured, realization is explosive.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.
But we had with us, to keep and to care for, more than five hundred bruised bodies of men- men made in the image of God, marred by the hand of man and must we say in the name of God? And where is the reckoning for such things? And who is answerable? One might almost shrink from the sound of his own voice, which had launched into the palpitating air words of order- do we call it? - fraught with such ruin. Was it God's command we heard or His forgiveness we must forever implore?
This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life β wait a second β you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.
The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.