Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
GORE VIDALIt 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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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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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 was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.
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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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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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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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Until very recently, the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.
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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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TV news is not very instructive.
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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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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My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
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The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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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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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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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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