Down & out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great re-deeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

Victory is to him who fights the longest.

‘A Jew, MON AMI, a veritable Jew! And he hasn’t even the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in the Russian Army— have I ever told you, MON AMI, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles?Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew

Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I asked him what he wanted. ‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you can take her away again. I don’t want to catch any diseases.’ ‘Diseases!’ cried the Jew, ‘MAIS, MONSIEUR LE CAPITAINE, there’s no fear of that. It’s my own daughter!’ That is the Jewish national character for you.

‘Have I ever told you, MON AMI, that in the old Russian Army it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew?Yes, we thought a Russian officer’s spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews

‘Curse it, what can one do on bread and potatoes? It is fa-tal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.’

the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners.

Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the. average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.

For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison.

man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.

The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually.