The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
GORE VIDALYou hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
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The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
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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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Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.
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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
GORE VIDAL -
I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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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.
GORE VIDAL -
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
GORE VIDAL -
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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American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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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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World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.
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I am only at home in the present.
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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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Gossip is conversation about people.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL -
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
GORE VIDAL