Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
GORE VIDALHe who is last had best laugh.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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We’re not a democracy.
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There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.
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Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
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I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.
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I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
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Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
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By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
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There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
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The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
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As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
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