Rubaiat

“Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.”
― Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia

“I liked Terry more than anyone I'd met for a long time, and we talked everyday. But he did believe the working class - which he referred to as if it were a single-willed-person - would do somewhat unlikely things. 'The working class will take care of those bastards very easily,' he said, referring to racist organisations.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.
The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,
and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good – for slaves at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London