It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.
GORE VIDALAt any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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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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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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Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
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It’s odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, ‘I’ve been reading you all my life.’ It makes you feel a slight chill.
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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.
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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.
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Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing.
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