Cuttlefish Quotes

• 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 squirting out ink.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Real, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

  John Ray

  Writing, Use, Using Words

  26 Copy quote

• Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish that, when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.

  Joseph Addison

  Water, Mind, Invisible

  The Spectator no. 476, 5 Sept. 1712

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• A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. 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.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Latin, Real

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

  P. J. O'Rourke

  People, Body, Dominion

  P. J. O'Rourke (2007). “Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government”, p.3, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There is the life of the plankton in almost endless variety; there are the many kinds of fish, both surface and bottom living; there are the hosts of different invertebrate creatures on the sea-floor; and there are those almost grotesque forms of pelagic life in the oceans depths. Then there are the squids and cuttlefish, and the porpoises, dolphins and great whales.

  Alister Hardy

  Ocean, Whales, Sea

  45 Copy quote