Does one ever read a politician’s books?
GORE VIDALAyn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
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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.
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It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
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In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
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After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
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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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Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.
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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.
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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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Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.
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