Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

Orwell contrasts “sainthood” with ordinary humanity, suggesting that moral perfection can be a kind of evasion. Many people, he implies, do not actually want the self-denial and otherworldliness associated with being a saint; they want a livable, mixed moral life. More sharply, he hints that some celebrated “saints” may be saintly partly because they have been spared the full range of human temptations—sexual desire, ambition, anger, vanity, compromise—so their virtue is less a hard-won achievement than a product of temperament or circumstance. The line questions moral hero-worship and argues for an ethics that takes human complexity seriously rather than idealizing purity.