When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
GORE VIDALDemocracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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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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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
GORE VIDAL