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.
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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I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
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He who is last had best laugh.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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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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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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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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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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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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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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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.
GORE VIDAL