Did George Orwell Say: IV

Did George Orwell say ‘Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it’?

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Yes and No: this Orwell quote is only complete if you know that Orwell wrote it in order to immediately deny that it is true. He wrote:

‘Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognize it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.’

You will see that Orwell quotes the premise but only to refute it (‘an illusion’). It comes from his review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read in Poetry Quarterly, Winter 1945.