I’m always an optimist!
GORE VIDALI am not, at heart, a playwright.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
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In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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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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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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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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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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On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
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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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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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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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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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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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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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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
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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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In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
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