If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.
GORE VIDALNever have children, only grandchildren.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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The media can’t get anything straight.
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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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.
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In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
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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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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
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I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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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.
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I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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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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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
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