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.
George Orwell (“Politics and the English Language“)
Orwell’s “Why I Write” (http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/whyiwrite.htm) was published a few months after “Politics and the English Language” and I think they fit perfectly together. You should check it out:
“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 which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
Orwell Essay Collection: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays.htm
Thanks for the quote.. and thanks for the link, great site!