Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

I am a contrarian.

Since I'm a contrarian, I don't want to go along with what everyone else thinks.

For someone to stand up against the norm makes them very intriguing to me.

I have contrarian tendencies.

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

I've never been a yes man.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

I am against the whole cliche of the moment.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.

Ever since I was a small child, I've had this feeling - it's in my nature, and so it's not even pretentious - that if everyone's going one way, I will go the other, just by some kind of spirit of defiance.

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

I've never been one to just do what I'm told. I don't say that necessarily with pride, it's just something that has gotten me in trouble before.

If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.

I think some people like me because I'm different. I don't think like everybody else. People are so tied up in the worst parts of technology these days. They live a life pressing buttons. They don't use their imaginations.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.