"Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot ch...
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
~ George Orwell ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
More George Orwell quotes
"We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
"But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has no ...
"The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
"When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt abo...
"Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own e...
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because t...
"The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who c...
"When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods...
"A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sen...
"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 un...
"It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, exc...
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefab...