Quotable Quotes: George Orwell
by Miki Saxon
I have no idea if George Orwell’s Animal Farm is still required reading, but it should be. In it is one of the most brilliant bits of insight on the human condition ever written; one that is as applicable now as when it was written and will continue to be as long as humans exist. “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
Many of the quotes you find from Orwell are political, and I skipped those and looked instead for those that I thought applied to the workplace.
If you’re old enough to have watched a few generations grow to adult status you’ll recognize the truth in these words, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” And Orwell said that before the Millennials were even gleams in their grandfathers’ eyes.
In business there is much talk about the importance of vision and how it must be communicated effectively, so that everyone understands. Orwell said, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In hindsight, you can see how these feed off each other over and over corrupting the actions that result from the thought and the language.
That kind of corruption can be stopped in its tracks by following another Orwell recommendation, “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
Image credit: PVBroadz on flickr
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