"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them"
About this Quote
Orwell’s jab lands because it flips the usual flattery attached to intelligence. We’re trained to think smart people are naturally insulated from bad ideas; he argues the opposite: intelligence can be the most efficient engine for self-deception. Not because the brilliant are dumber, but because they’re better at building airtight narratives around what they already want to be true.
The line is a compact anatomy of ideology. “So wrong” isn’t casual error; it’s moral and empirical wrongness made sturdy through sophistication. Only an “intelligent person” can keep believing because they can rationalize contradictions, turn caveats into escape hatches, and convert messy reality into elegant theory. The subtext is ruthless: the more mental tools you have, the easier it is to mistake your toolkit for truth itself.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of totalitarian propaganda and the mid-century romance with grand systems - fascism, Stalinism, and various salon-friendly justifications for political cruelty. In essays like “Politics and the English Language,” he warns that bad politics feeds on bad thinking, and bad thinking hides inside polished language. This quote is that warning, sharpened to a needle: intelligence doesn’t guarantee clarity; it can produce a higher-grade blindness, defended not with ignorance but with footnotes.
It also reads as a rebuke to intellectual culture: the temptation to treat complexity as virtue, to assume that if an idea is convoluted enough, it must be profound. Orwell’s point is that some beliefs require brilliance precisely because they can’t survive contact with plain speech and ordinary scrutiny.
The line is a compact anatomy of ideology. “So wrong” isn’t casual error; it’s moral and empirical wrongness made sturdy through sophistication. Only an “intelligent person” can keep believing because they can rationalize contradictions, turn caveats into escape hatches, and convert messy reality into elegant theory. The subtext is ruthless: the more mental tools you have, the easier it is to mistake your toolkit for truth itself.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of totalitarian propaganda and the mid-century romance with grand systems - fascism, Stalinism, and various salon-friendly justifications for political cruelty. In essays like “Politics and the English Language,” he warns that bad politics feeds on bad thinking, and bad thinking hides inside polished language. This quote is that warning, sharpened to a needle: intelligence doesn’t guarantee clarity; it can produce a higher-grade blindness, defended not with ignorance but with footnotes.
It also reads as a rebuke to intellectual culture: the temptation to treat complexity as virtue, to assume that if an idea is convoluted enough, it must be profound. Orwell’s point is that some beliefs require brilliance precisely because they can’t survive contact with plain speech and ordinary scrutiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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