George Orwell wrote plenty of biting, memorable lines in his career as a novelist, journalist, and critic.
“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
But one phrase from an essay exploring why H.G. Wells—one of Orwell’s boyhood heroes—could never adequately grapple with the true nature of totalitarianism remains among the most resonant and most chilling.
“Because [Wells] belonged to the 19th century,” Orwell wrote in August 1941, “he was, and is still, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts, they are at …