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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.

Gore Vidal

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
Certainly ‘The Judgment of Paris’ was the novel in which I found my own voice.
GORE VIDAL

Finding Judgement Myself Novel Voice
I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
GORE VIDAL

Bribe Happiness Myself Quite
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
GORE VIDAL

Day Study Truth Unknown
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
GORE VIDAL

Dream Myself Writing
Never have children, only grandchildren.
GORE VIDAL

Children Family Funny
He who is last had best laugh.
GORE VIDAL

End Himself Laughter
I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
GORE VIDAL

Law Myself Potential Reading Review View
Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
GORE VIDAL

Difference Himself Religion
Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
GORE VIDAL

Age Beginning Myself
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
GORE VIDAL

Enough Failure Success
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
GORE VIDAL

Age Believe Exercise Imagination Spirit
Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
GORE VIDAL

Agreement Father Fellow Himself Raise Secret
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
GORE VIDAL

Government Need People Philosophy Religion
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 the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
GORE VIDAL

Age Perfection Progression Rule Television
We’re not a democracy.
GORE VIDAL

Democracy One Liner
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government’s mischief… the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.
GORE VIDAL

Age Country Government Ideas Mischief Provoke Strike
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
GORE VIDAL

Bank Loyalty President
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
GORE VIDAL

Candidate Democracy Issues Place
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.
GORE VIDAL

Depression Government Manager Name People Public Rich War
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.
GORE VIDAL

Build Meaning Novel Sex
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
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
GORE VIDAL

Class Genius heavy Ourselves Rule System
When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
GORE VIDAL

Myself President Thinking
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 VIDAL

Invention President Suspend War
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
GORE VIDAL

Happiness Liberty Life Right

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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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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