Politics & Power Quote by George Orwell

A polite society runs on ugly errands, and Orwell is naming the clerk behind the counter. “Defense of the indefensible” isn’t just a complaint about lying; it’s an accusation that modern politics has turned language into a laundering machine, taking violence, exploitation, and hypocrisy and sending them back out as something that can pass in public.

The line lands because it’s structurally unforgiving. “In our time” narrows the target to a specific historical moment while implying a recurring disease: when institutions are stressed, words don’t clarify, they anesthetize. “Largely” is the dagger of the realist, conceding exceptions so the charge can’t be dismissed as mere cynicism. Then Orwell flips the moral compass: the problem isn’t that politicians sometimes misuse language, it’s that the primary job of political language has become moral evasion.

The subtext is about complicity. If speech exists mainly to defend what can’t be defended, listeners aren’t being informed; they’re being recruited. Euphemism, passive voice, and abstractions (“collateral,” “stability,” “security”) don’t merely obscure responsibility, they spread it thin enough that no one has to feel it.

Context matters: Orwell wrote in the shadow of propaganda regimes, imperial brutality, and wartime spin, when mass media could synchronize a nation’s vocabulary. The sentence doubles as a warning to writers, too. If you let your prose go slack, power will happily borrow it. Clarity becomes a political act not because it’s virtuous, but because it disrupts the machinery.