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.
GORE VIDALIt 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
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History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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I’m always an optimist!
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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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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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It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
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Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
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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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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
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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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Every country should have at least one King Farouk.
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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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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Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Corporations must pay tax.
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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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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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I hate nobody.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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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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The unfed mind devours itself.
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The United States is a madhouse.
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