Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
GORE VIDALThat is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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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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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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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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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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I hate nobody.
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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
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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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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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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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Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
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Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
GORE VIDAL