Wealth & Money Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s line lands like a filed-down blade: it rejects the comforting liberal story that history naturally trends toward fairness if we just get richer, nicer, or more “enlightened.” The repetition of “no” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s not a debate; it’s a verdict. And the “millimeter” is classic Orwellian contempt for grand rhetoric, shrinking centuries of moral boasting down to a unit you’d use to measure a scratch on a table.

The intent is less to deny that societies can become less cruel than to puncture the idea that inequality is a solvable technical problem. “Wealth” promises abundance, “softening of manners” promises civility, “reform” promises gradualism, “revolution” promises rupture. Orwell dismisses every political temperament in one breath, implying that each is capable of preserving hierarchy under new branding. The subtext: humans don’t just fall into inequality by accident; we rebuild it, because status is addictive and power has successors.

Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of total war, the rise of fascism, and the left’s disillusionment with Soviet-style “equality” that quickly hardened into a new ruling class. His socialism was moral and anti-authoritarian; his target here is the self-congratulating belief that institutional change automatically purifies human motives.

What makes it work is its bleak clarity. Orwell isn’t asking you to stop hoping; he’s warning you where hope gets weaponized: by elites who sell progress as proof that domination has ended, right as it changes clothes.