"Shooting an Elephant" Quotes

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.

I had got to shoot the elephant.

I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle.

I did not in the least want to shoot him. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air.

It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.

He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling.