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.

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.

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.

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

empire is primarily a money-making concern.

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

But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. "He knows all about me," you feel; "he wrote this specially for me." It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpos

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

it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind,