The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell

I suppose it is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so many of these men look younger than their ages.

In spite of hard trying, man has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt everywhere.

Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, “When we were told about it,”

Give people a decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent.

sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process—the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.

And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.

If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed.

Our unemployment allowances, miserable though they are, are framed to suit a population with very high standards and not much notion of economy. If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly.

In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.

All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

If you want to make an enemy of a man, tell him that his ills are incurable.

The truth is that to many people, calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which “we,” the clever ones, are going to impose upon “them,” the Lower Orders.

The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty.

Economically, I am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; remind me of that and I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against them.