A Collection of Essays

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part Of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting ag

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

men can only be highly civilised while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.

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 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.

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

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

how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

empire is primarily a money-making concern.