To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
GORE VIDALIt 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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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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As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.
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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
GORE VIDAL






