More Public-Spirited Pigs

T.S. Eliot, then a director of publisher Faber & Faber, in his letter to George Orwell rejecting Animal Farm:

And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm — in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

(Via Brent Simmons.)

★ Wednesday, 8 April 2009