I’m always an optimist!
GORE VIDALA racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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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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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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Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
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Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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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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Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
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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 cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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