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

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The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.
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Next to I win, I told you so are the sweetest words.
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I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.
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In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
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Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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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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The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans in the New World, of course, they could and did.
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The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
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I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?
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In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
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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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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
Gore Vidal