I’m always an optimist!
GORE VIDALThere is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
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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.
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.
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A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.
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Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
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The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
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It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
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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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I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
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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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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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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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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.
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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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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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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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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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I hate nobody.
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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.
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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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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?
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