The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

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. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Language is an evil thing, a very evil thing. And a force to be reckoned with.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

There is no language without deceit.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

...language is never innocent.

Beware of language, for it is often a great cheat.

Beware clarity. A man speaking to you in clear language is clearly using obsolete ideas.

Language can be very adept at hiding the truth.

The great enemy of integrity is not falsehood as such but … the attractiveness of foreign truths, truths that belong to others.