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 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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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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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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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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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.
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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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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
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Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
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I am only at home in the present.
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American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
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Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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We’re not a democracy.
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