TV news is not very instructive.
GORE VIDALDoes one ever read a politician’s books?
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
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I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
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Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
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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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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
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While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
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To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
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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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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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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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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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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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