The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.


Gore Vidal

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The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.
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The fear of God is the only cure for the fear of people.
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The end is the matter! A step to the end is a factor!
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Anything man can make, man can destroy.
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Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
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The love you get, is equal to the love you give.
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Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
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Now is the only time we have, and the only time we have any control over.
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May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ...
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The United States presents a value system to the world that is based on democracy, based on economic...
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It was because they were two parts of a whole. He did not belong to her. And she did not belong to h...
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Cease with the displays of false modesty. The entire palace knows about it."
A feeling of warmt...
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Do you know why I adore roses?" Shahrzad untied the knot of his tikka sash with deliberate slowness....
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Where were you?" Shahrzad tried to control the tremor in her voice.
"Not where I should have b...
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As always. As ever. As a rose to the sun.
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Here is one fact 1 minute to finish the class, 1 day to die, one day behind that fact, one day in th...
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I’d wish it were easier to not allow other people’s pasts to create my own present.
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I love you." she whispered into the rough wool of his sweater.
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I make mistakes. That's what I do. I
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Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American...
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Use your heart. Understand. Learn to see things
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Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?...
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To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of Americ...
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The warm sound of her laughter stole through Khalid's skin, heating the coldest reaches of his soul.
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Now is everything
Now is the essence
Now is the focus
Focus on the now
For that ...
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It was frustrating to still be in the dark about something and be given only so little light.
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Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.
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What lies ahead of you is better than what you have already experienced.
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Everyone gets dumped and everyone gets hurt and there's karma to love in regards to what you'...
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I don't think she's a lesbian. I think she just ran out of men. [Charlotte]
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When you are with the wrong person, who doesn't really love you, all you want is to be adored. I...
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I really like the look of the 1950s, lots of suburban Americana influences. I'm 5'4', so...
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I am very curvy, so the vintage stores suit me better than most designers. I just can't seem to ...
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I have quite a lot of plastic sunglasses. It's just a nice accessory, it adds a final thing, and...
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I lived in Greece for about four years of my life, and living there had a huge impact on my life gro...
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I love natural beauty, and I think it's your best look, but I think makeup as an artist is so tr...
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I think celebrity culture and sexuality in pop music is really important, but I want there to be an ...
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I'm not really part of that 'L.A. thing' or that celebrity culture. I'm more like so...
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This obsession with celebrity culture is really unhealthy. I don't want to live my life like tha...
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Even when I see a beautiful woman, I think, 'Aw, her life must be amazing.' Everyone does it...
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Blonde symbolises sexuality and power - it holds very different connotations. The archetypal star ha...
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Love is really my nemesis. I never really allowed myself to indulge in such basic things because I w...
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Britney Spears is a big influence. Huge. I think people thought I was joking about that for a long t...
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Puberty is a phase... fifteen years of rejection is a lifestyle. [Stanford]
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I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about i...
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I often take things I find in vintage crawls and hand them to a very good seamstress, who then repli...
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I've read every Madonna biography. I've also looked up every pop star to see how they first ...
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Oh my God, she's fashion road-kill!
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I love you, but I love myself more.
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Maybe mistakes are what make our fate... without them what would shape our lives? Maybe if we had ne...
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Desperate Housewives.
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Sean (while ice-skating with Carrie): I'm guessing it's easier to balance when you're not smoking.Ca...
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I want you to look at me, connect with me. This is lovemaking, it's not a porno flick. [Maria]
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I once was broken up with by a guy's doorman. 'I'm sorry Ms. Hobbes, Jonathan won't be coming down. ...
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I feel like everyone has the right to privacy, even if you're the most famous person in the worl...
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When you are in the studio, you don't have anybody to feed off of; meanwhile, when you are playi...
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I am absolutely not a roll-on-stage kind of girl! I would be totally freaked out if I didn't war...
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It's a slippery slope, Carrie. Without boundaries you never know what might happen. [Miranda]
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the sort of person who'd back Proposition 14.
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A stud is born! [Stanford]
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Maybe we should get married.[Charlotte] Alrighty.[Trey]
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Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story.
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No lady likes to dance or dine, accompanied by a porcupine. Burma Shave.
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I don't think I'm an instantaneous act the whole world will love in one second - but that...
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What's the big mystery? It's my vagina, not the sphinx! [Miranda]
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My style icons are Leigh Lezark, Gwen Stefani and Shirley Manson.
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I do have a memo all the time because I need to be guided by something in my life. I'm not relig...
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I'm masquerading as an innocent pop star.
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the lights fade to black.
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Yeah, I would love to. I don't know if I'd do another singing one.
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Bellhop: "this is a non-smoking floor."Carrie: "I have an addiction sir!"
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F*** me badly once, shame on you. F*** me badly twice, shame on me.
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Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, 'Well, so-and-so will like this,' which ...
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McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
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I can understand companionship.
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Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He u...
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The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Li...
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I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose p...
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them ...
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As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a pol...
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No Fi...
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At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some eviden...
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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
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I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to ...
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Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness witho...
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps twenty players, an...
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That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness...
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Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
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For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures ar...
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Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is...
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence...
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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Fr...
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I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
GORE VIDAL
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo -- or heterosex...
GORE VIDAL
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex cer...
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The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
GORE VIDAL
Never have children, only grand children.
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Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described,...
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I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you ...
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When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a C...
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How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time...
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There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master...
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Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is a...
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No Fi...
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For half a century, photography has been the art form of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are...
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...
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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives ...
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Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But the...
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues an...
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Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning wh...
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imag...
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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, ...
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours,...
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I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual live...
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
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All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which ...
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence t...
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It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we...
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It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
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I'm a born-again atheist.
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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes i...
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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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Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
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It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real trag...
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We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us th...
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For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, t...
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On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a deb...
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Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.
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Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust a...
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I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to ill...
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There is only one party in the United States: the Property party... and it has two right wings: Repu...
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To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not al...
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By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Re...
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It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.
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Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the t...
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I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased beha...
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Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete w...
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Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillf...
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Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a f...
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Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.
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In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he wa...
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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 four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four per...
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Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
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No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be...
GORE VIDAL
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the sc...
GORE VIDAL
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
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By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We als...
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Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriousl...
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The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself a...
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For certain people after 50, litigation takes the place of sex.
GORE VIDAL
It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.
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Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
GORE VIDAL
For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL
I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to ...
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Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for c...
GORE VIDAL
I might be President by now if it weren't for this 'queer' thing
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Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualifi...
GORE VIDAL
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
GORE VIDAL
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who...
GORE VIDAL
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
GORE VIDAL
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
GORE VIDAL
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we ca...
GORE VIDAL
Never have children, only grandchildren.
GORE VIDAL
It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four p...
GORE VIDAL
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is ...
GORE VIDAL
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand th...
GORE VIDAL
Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies.
GORE VIDAL
Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desparately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
GORE VIDAL
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers...
GORE VIDAL
There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
GORE VIDAL
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once...
GORE VIDAL
I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a fe...
GORE VIDAL
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and h...
GORE VIDAL
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested...
GORE VIDAL
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's t...
GORE VIDAL
He (Donald) is thorough and very careful not to take sides when there's insufficient evidence,
GORE VIDAL
Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make se...
GORE VIDAL
Rome... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of bein...
GORE VIDAL
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in ...
GORE VIDAL
Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.
GORE VIDAL
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we ca...
GORE VIDAL
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
GORE VIDAL
Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'
GORE VIDAL
On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congres...
GORE VIDAL
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes...
GORE VIDAL
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generatio...
GORE VIDAL
Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West...
GORE VIDAL
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority mus...
GORE VIDAL
I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.
GORE VIDAL
The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.
GORE VIDAL
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseu...
GORE VIDAL
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of oth...
GORE VIDAL
I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.
GORE VIDAL
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning th...
GORE VIDAL
What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexu...
GORE VIDAL
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexua...
GORE VIDAL
In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.
GORE VIDAL
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writ...
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imag...
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Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
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Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grindin...
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Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fi...
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Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
GORE VIDAL
What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
GORE VIDAL
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives ...
GORE VIDAL
These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all ga...
GORE VIDAL
The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttres...
GORE VIDAL
Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
GORE VIDAL
I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims."
GORE VIDAL
roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private ...
GORE VIDAL
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults
GORE VIDAL
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author'...
GORE VIDAL
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small Amer...
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Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...
GORE VIDAL
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself m...
GORE VIDAL
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic ...
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I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on an...
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I don't want anything. I don't want a job. I don't want to be respectable. I don't want prizes. I tu...
GORE VIDAL
Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose....
GORE VIDAL
A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking tha...
GORE VIDAL
I'm a born-again atheist
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We are the United States of Amnesia.
GORE VIDAL
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
GORE VIDAL
It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four per...
GORE VIDAL
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I ...
GORE VIDAL
That is New York. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine.
GORE VIDAL
For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex
GORE VIDAL
A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich d...
GORE VIDAL
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
GORE VIDAL
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience al...
GORE VIDAL
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religi...
GORE VIDAL
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues wil...
GORE VIDAL
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take ...
GORE VIDAL
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen y...
GORE VIDAL
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perce...
GORE VIDAL
Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
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Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere bec...
GORE VIDAL
Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
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You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel do...
GORE VIDAL
Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and...
GORE VIDAL
Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe a...
GORE VIDAL
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
GORE VIDAL
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel...
GORE VIDAL
The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps for...
GORE VIDAL
The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
GORE VIDAL
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upo...
GORE VIDAL
My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees...
GORE VIDAL
...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?
GORE VIDAL
The failure of Hellenism has been, largely, a matter of organization. Rome never tried to impose any...
GORE VIDAL
But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more s...
GORE VIDAL