A Collection of Essays

We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment," demands that the robbery shall continue.

In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings.

empire is primarily a money-making concern.

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoid