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We’re not a democracy.

Gore Vidal

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
GORE VIDAL

Bird Man Stand Time
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL

Death Friendship Myself Success
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.
GORE VIDAL

Evidence Figure Reading Speech
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
I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Nature Pollution Water
I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
GORE VIDAL

Myself Reading Truth
American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
GORE VIDAL

Academics Fall Hands History
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
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
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.
GORE VIDAL

Elimination Management Media Object Opinion World
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
I am not, at heart, a playwright.
GORE VIDAL

Heart Personality Play
I’m always an optimist!
GORE VIDAL

Myself Optimism
Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
GORE VIDAL

Contemporary Realize Young Yourself
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
GORE VIDAL

Anxiety Night Youth
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
GORE VIDAL

Book Fact Kind Loose Opinion Popular Question Review Treat

We’re not a democracy.

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We’re not a democracy.

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