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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
Language
Vote
Gore
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

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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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Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
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When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
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A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.
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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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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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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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Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
Gore Vidal
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I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.
Gore Vidal
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You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal
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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
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People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.
Gore Vidal
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Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
Gore Vidal
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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
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Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
Gore Vidal
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Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.
Gore Vidal