Quotes from Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' . . . there is no end to it.

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .

The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.