Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
GORE VIDALNow 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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The United States is a madhouse.
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The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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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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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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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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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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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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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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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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Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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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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Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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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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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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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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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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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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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.
GORE VIDAL