政治与英语

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupts thought.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.

... one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring some improvement by starting the verbal end.

Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse

...But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves

Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact.... A writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase

These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

...totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious.

...freedom of the press, it if means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background...

Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

Literature has sometimes flourishded under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship.

The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it.

It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say "In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that" than to say "I think"

Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that the language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.

there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning, and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying

Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.

"phenomenon", "element", "individual", "objective", "categorical", "effective", "virtual", "basic", "primary","promote","constitute","exhibit","exploit"

cul de sac, ancien régime, mutais mutandis, status quo

Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones

the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like "The Soviet press is the freest in the world" are almost always made with intent to deceive.