George Orwell Intelligent Quotations

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

The more intelligent, the less sane