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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

TV news is not very instructive.
GORE VIDAL

Instruction One Liner
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
GORE VIDAL

Academics Fall Hands History
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
GORE VIDAL

Chaos Moments Opinion Prejudice Public
Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
GORE VIDAL

Decline Ignorance Income Sadness
I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
GORE VIDAL

Conspiracy Myself Theory
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
GORE VIDAL

Active Literature Lose Time Virtue World Writing
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
GORE VIDAL

Camp Concentration Discrimination German Oppression
I can understand companionship.
GORE VIDAL

Companionship Understand
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
GORE VIDAL

Essential Experience Literature Natural Work
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.
GORE VIDAL

Impulse People Person Practice Sexual
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
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.
GORE VIDAL

Difficult Himself Honesty Pretend
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL

Hope Newspaper Oneself People Reading
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
GORE VIDAL

Action God Karma Life Right Welfare
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
GORE VIDAL

Note Suicide Writing
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.
GORE VIDAL

Money Talk Tax Time

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

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Popular Authors

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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