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 VIDALWhen I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
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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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The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.
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As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I’ve always been very pro-African-American – or whatever phrase we now use.
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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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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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I hate nobody.
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Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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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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Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
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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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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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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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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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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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It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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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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It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.
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What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.
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