Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.

red-haired Jew,

A curious stereotype, also found in "McTeague," in a similar occupation.

Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour,

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?

he was a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk.

For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.

People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary.

We have a feeling that it must be “honest” work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

Of the Imitation of Christ.

Thomas Merton.

(the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him),