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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.

Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal
Age: 86 †
Born: 1925
Born: October 3
Died: 2012
Died: July 31
Actor
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
West Point
New York
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Gor Vidal
Cameron Kay
Eugene Luther Vidal
Edgar Box
Katherine Everard
Eugene Vidal
Used
Cities
Propaganda
Euphemism
Time
Grows
Destroying
Illuminate
People
Politics
Interests
Liberate
Interest
Election
Correctness
Words
Communication
Confuse
Language
Vote
Gore
Action
City
Societies
Decadent
Political
Grow
Disguise
Solemnly

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
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Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.
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I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
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Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
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Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
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Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.
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The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
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There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.
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If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
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I like Italy. I was always at home there, it's a marvelous place to become invisible. Nobody bothers you and nobody is interested in you and I find that very good for work.
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
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I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
Gore Vidal