Orwell's six rules for writers

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 
• Never use a long word where a short one will do. 
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 
• Never use the passive where you can use the active. 
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

from Politics and the English Language (1946)

Cathy

The New Ten Commandments

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. 
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm. 
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect. 
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. 
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
6. Always seek to be learning something new. 
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them. 
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you. 
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others. 
10. Question everything.

http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/new10c.html

...annotated.

... I am trying my best not to view things through a smug later prism. Only the Almighty can scan matters sub specie aeternitatis: from the viewpoint of eternity. One must also avoid cultural and historical relativism: there’s no point in retroactively ordering the Children of Israel to develop a germ theory of disease (so as to avoid mistaking plagues for divine punishments) or to understand astronomy (so as not to make foolish predictions and boasts based on the planets and stars). Still, if we think of the evils that afflict humanity today and that are man-made and not inflicted by nature, we would be morally numb if we did not feel strongly about genocide, slavery, rape, child abuse, sexual repression, white-collar crime, the wanton destruction of the natural world, and people who yak on cell phones in restaurants. (Also, people who commit simultaneous suicide and murder while screaming “God is great”: is that taking the Lord’s name in vain or is it not?) 

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. ... Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Christopher Hitchens, from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/04/hitchens-201004