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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
Action
City
Societies
Decadent
Political
Grow
Disguise
Solemnly
Used
Cities
Propaganda
Euphemism
Time
Grows
Destroying
Illuminate
People
Politics
Interests
Liberate
Interest
Election
Correctness
Words
Communication
Confuse
Language
Vote
Gore

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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.
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Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
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Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
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[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
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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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First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
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I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
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If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
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Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.
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Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
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I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
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The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
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The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
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You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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