Life & Wisdom Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s line is a poisoned compliment: “enlightened” reads like praise, then he snaps the reader with the accusation that the same people are responsibility-free. The trick is that he’s not really talking about wisdom; he’s talking about the kind of self-identifying modern “enlightenment” that turns into an alibi. If you see through every institution, every patriotic myth, every bourgeois ritual, you can start treating commitment as a form of naivete. Responsibility becomes what other, less knowing people do.

The subtext is a warning about moral vanity. Orwell had little patience for intellectuals who could diagnose society’s rot with exquisite precision while avoiding the messy obligations of repair. In his world, skepticism is cheap; paying for your convictions is expensive. The barb lands because it reverses a familiar hierarchy: the enlightened are supposed to be the adults in the room, yet Orwell suggests they often outsource adulthood to those they privately regard as dupes.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of fascism, Stalinism, and the ideological trench warfare of the 1930s and 1940s, Orwell watched clever people excuse brutality as “historical necessity” or retreat into cleverness itself. The line doubles as a critique of salon radicalism and a broader indictment of detachment: when politics becomes a posture, you can keep your hands clean and your conscience cleaner.

It works because it’s not an argument; it’s a provocation. Orwell forces the reader to ask whether their sophistication has become a way of ducking the risk of being answerable.