Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller ‘Seven Days in May,’ later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.
GORE VIDALPolicemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
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Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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I’m always an optimist!
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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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I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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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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Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
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Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
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The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
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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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I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.
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The United States is a madhouse.
GORE VIDAL