Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
GORE VIDALAs 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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The United States is a madhouse.
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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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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.
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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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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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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
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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 never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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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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Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
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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 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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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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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 don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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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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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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