taken from: orwell's article 'Second Thoughts on James Burnham', in 'Polemic' (May 1946). [you can read this text online: click here]original text:

[...] The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were more defeatist than the mass of the people — and some of them went on being defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won — partly because they were better able to visualise the dreary years of warfare that lay ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory. [...]

about the quoted person:George Orwell was the pen name of the English author Eric Arthur Blair who is well-known for his novels 1984 and animal farm.see george orwell for a comprehensive biography.this quote is taken from an article in which george orwell criticizes the political theory of james burnham, author of 'The Managerial Revolution' (1941). In this book burnham states that, as politics is simply a struggle for power, only a strict bureaucratic and social-scientific form of governing will survive – whether it be nazism, communism or a new form of capitalism.