While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.
GORE VIDALWhat 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.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.
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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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I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.
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Gossip is conversation about people.
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The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
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What I like least about myself is my belligerence.
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I am not, at heart, a playwright.
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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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When I say ‘president,’ I still mean Roosevelt – wisely, I think.
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I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that’s the last thing I wanted.
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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.
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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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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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL