Politics and the English Language
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to wh... See more
Why I Write | the Orwell Foundation
“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
-George Orwell
no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
George Orwell • Why I Write (Penguin Great Ideas)
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell
Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase,