Life & Wisdom Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s line lands like a pep talk delivered through clenched teeth. He grants the modern faith in progress just enough legitimacy to keep the reader from retreating into nihilism, then immediately sabotages any triumphalist comfort: yes, things change, but not on the schedule you want, and not in the clean, uplifting way the brochures promise.

The wit is in the engineering of the sentence. “Not an illusion” is a rebuke to fashionable despair, but “slow and invariably disappointing” is a rebuke to the opposite fashion: liberal optimism as a kind of self-administered anesthesia. Orwell is staking out his signature middle ground between propaganda and surrender. Progress exists, he insists, but it arrives compromised - partial, reversible, stained by the human habits (fear, conformity, appetite for power) that supposedly modernity will outgrow.

The subtext is moral and political. Orwell had watched the 20th century sell itself as a story of improvement while perfecting new techniques of domination: total war, mass surveillance, ideological spectacle. After Spain, after the purges, after the rationed “victories” of wartime Britain, he understood that history doesn’t advance; it lurches, and it drags people with it. Calling progress “invariably disappointing” isn’t contrarian flair - it’s a demand for adult expectations. If you think progress is inevitable, you stop guarding it. If you think it’s impossible, you stop trying.

So the intent is bracing: keep your eyes open, keep moving anyway. The disappointment isn’t an argument against progress; it’s the price of refusing comforting lies.