The Road To Wigan Pier Quotes
"The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls' clogs down the cobbled street."
"We were therefore sleeping in what was still recognisably a drawing-room."
"There is the question of time, also. A miner's working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound very long."
"For it is to be noted that the majority of these houses are old, fifty or sixty years old at least."
"The smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable."
"The best-kept interiors I saw were always childless houses or houses where there were only one or two children."
"In the end Mrs Brooker's self-pitying talk—always the same complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine of 'It does seem 'ard, don't it now?'—revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper."
"But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind."
"But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it."
"Every yard or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck."
"The thought that haunted me as I went from caravan to caravan was, What can happen in those cramped interiors when anybody dies?"
"Some hardly seemed to care; others realised quite clearly in what misery they were living."
"I gathered that in that dreadful pigsty, struggling to keep her large brood of children clean, she felt as I should feel if I were coated all over with dung."
"Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it'."
"I do not know whether this is true. What is certain is that nobody now thinks it bearable to sleep eleven in a room."
"The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another."
"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."
"But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women."
"You can't settle to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you."
"I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews, but I want here to contradict a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian."
"The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the 'eighties and 'nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded."
"The essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money."
"Probably there are countries where you can predict a man's opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as well."
"Of course it is obvious now that the upper-middle class is done for."
"Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be."
"To belong to this class when you were at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical."
"In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole."
"An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred."
"Race hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot."
"But the essential thing is that middle-class people believe that the working class are dirty—you see from the passage quoted above that Mr Maugham himself believes it—and, what is worse, that they are somehow inherently dirty."
"To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another."
"The worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."
"Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as abroad."
"The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty."
"The real Socialist is one who wishes—not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes—to see tyranny overthrown."
"The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors."
"The job of the Socialist is to get [justice and liberty] out again."
"Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia."
"All people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side."
"The office-worker and the black-coated employee... must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't."
"Socialism is compatible with common decency."