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 VIDALThe United States is a madhouse.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
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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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We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.
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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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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
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I can understand companionship.
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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
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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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The United States is a madhouse.
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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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