George Orwell Quotes

We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

Once, in a magazine interview, I said the difference between shoe ladies and bag ladies is that shoe ladies are just a bit classier. Finished! That started World War III among all the women I knew. I only meant that shoes do more for your look and body than bags do!

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

No one capable of maintaining himself by art or labour pretend to be poor and beg his food on pain of imprisonment.

I don't know how much the economy has changed since Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.'

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

Poverty, Poetry, and new Titles of Honor, make Men ridiculous

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.

Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.

I hear the first drops. Like the tapping of a stranger at the door of a dream, the rain changes everything.

If you don't have jobs, it's hard to have other things like health and education.

The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.

When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend...and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

Technology isn't the villain and the people aren't often really the villain so much as they're weak.