It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
GORE VIDALUntil very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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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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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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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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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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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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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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Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.
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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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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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The media can’t get anything straight.
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
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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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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.
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Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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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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I’m always an optimist!
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In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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