Status Updates From Politics and the English La...

Political language -- and
with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind.

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 spurting out ink.

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology [monotonous political speeches] has gone
some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his
words for himself.