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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

Gore Vidal

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.
GORE VIDAL

Damage End Greatness Nation Powerful War
I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
GORE VIDAL

Appearance Cold Love Warm Water Yourself
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
GORE VIDAL

Journalism Reality World
It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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Best Divorce Finding Ourselves People Stay
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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Character Creation Impression Myself Settle Writing
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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Enough Failure Success
It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
GORE VIDAL

Change Reality Time Torture Victim
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
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Father Life Myself Politics
Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
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Wikipedia Wrong
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
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Deserve Enough Stupidity
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
GORE VIDAL

Happiness Liberty Life Right
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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Active Literature Lose Time Virtue World Writing
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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Greatness Loud Race Yourself
The United States is a madhouse.
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Country Home Madness State
The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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Beautiful Language Ourselves Word
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
GORE VIDAL

Book Edition Grown Library Reading

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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