It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.


George Orwell

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GEORGE ORWELL
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a goo...
GEORGE ORWELL
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents
GEORGE ORWELL
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
GEORGE ORWELL
Minds are like parachutes-- they only function when open. Thomas Dewar "Doublethink" means the pow...
GEORGE ORWELL
Insanity is my only means of relaxation
GEORGE ORWELL
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
GEORGE ORWELL
For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
GEORGE ORWELL
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
GEORGE ORWELL
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
GEORGE ORWELL
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
GEORGE ORWELL
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded
GEORGE ORWELL
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
GEORGE ORWELL
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the ...
GEORGE ORWELL
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an app...
GEORGE ORWELL
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
GEORGE ORWELL
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or th...
GEORGE ORWELL
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Lov...
GEORGE ORWELL
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one...
GEORGE ORWELL
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equali...
GEORGE ORWELL
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, a...
GEORGE ORWELL
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the futu...
GEORGE ORWELL
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
GEORGE ORWELL
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men...
GEORGE ORWELL
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
GEORGE ORWELL
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
GEORGE ORWELL
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
GEORGE ORWELL
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
GEORGE ORWELL
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
GEORGE ORWELL
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...
GEORGE ORWELL
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
GEORGE ORWELL
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
GEORGE ORWELL
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we be...
GEORGE ORWELL
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improve...
GEORGE ORWELL
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which i...
GEORGE ORWELL
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
GEORGE ORWELL
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
GEORGE ORWELL
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
GEORGE ORWELL
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
GEORGE ORWELL
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
GEORGE ORWELL
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
GEORGE ORWELL
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicte...
GEORGE ORWELL
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story...
GEORGE ORWELL
She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed
GEORGE ORWELL
The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.
GEORGE ORWELL
Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.
GEORGE ORWELL
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their b...
GEORGE ORWELL
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on t...
GEORGE ORWELL
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personal...
GEORGE ORWELL
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and inte...
GEORGE ORWELL
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
GEORGE ORWELL
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physi...
GEORGE ORWELL