"Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not just on language but on society itself. He described the speaker who “has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine”, observing: “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.” We often hear such speakers at business conferences and on political platforms"
"Orwell insisted that the meaning should choose the word, and not the other way about. For Havel, in the more desperate environment of communist Czechoslovakia, the issue was “the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love”. We miss the unflinching intellectual integrity of these great writers"
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