"An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is the great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

"Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment - you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.

Half the world is starving, and the other's going, 'I don't actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.'"
- Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

"You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

"It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring."
- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London