> It wasn't Orwell, it ws Lytton Strachey.
>
> Joanna
I can't believe that such a well known saying can be so mis-attributed. The writer that thought that was Orwell, guffaw. Justin was right, it was Lincoln Steffens.
The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996.
I have been over into the future, and it works. ATTRIBUTION: Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), U.S. writer, editor. Quoted in Steffens, Autobiography, ch. 18 (1931).
Remark to financier Bernard Baruch, on his return from the Soviet Union in 1919; he made the same remark in a letter, April 3, 1919.
A chapter on Steffens here, if memory serves, The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual As a Social Type by Christopher Lasch
Neo-con Paul Hollander assembled the most embarrassing quotes by "fellow travelers" and Communists during and after their trips to the fSU, PRC, and Cuba in, "Political Pilgrims." British leftist historian, David Caute does the same in, "The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism." Great essay by German new leftist, Han Magnus Enzenberger on "revolutionary tourism, " see his essay collection, "The consciousness industry;: On literature, politics and the media,. " -- Michael Pugliese