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Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

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
Scale
Scales
Highest
Democracy
Politics
Form
Bribery

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I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
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No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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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.
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By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success
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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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True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
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The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
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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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If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general (They tell lies, he used to say with wonder, even when they don't have to).
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Realism has always been called cynicism.
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Christianity is such a silly religion.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes I think Rumsfeld also.
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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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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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