The Road to Wigan Pier Quotes

“Tea, the Englishman's opium.”

“Our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.”

“The English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically.”

“Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.”

“We spend our lives in abusing England but grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things.”

“Wikipedia: The Road to Wigan Pier”

“There is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards.”

“It directs attention away from the central fact that poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain-pen.”

“The Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages.”

“This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years.”

“A middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the "lower classes."”

“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”

“The Road to Wigan Pier - Searchable, indexed etext.”

“The modern English literary world, at any rate the high-brow section of it, is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds can flourish.”

“The world, potentially at least, is immensely rich; develop it as it might be developed, and we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to.”

“The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling, and the even feebler poets who are associated with him.”

“In almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches.”

“The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.”

“Works by George Orwell (including full text of The Road to Wigan Pier) at Project Gutenberg Australia.”

“It it curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but not to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners.”