Quote

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

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
Earth
Forty
Virus
Every
Billions
Viruses
Years
Environmental
Organism
Think
Whose
Attacked
Thinking
Numbers
Gore
Either
Organisms
Dies
Double
Living
Host
Bacteria

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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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I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.
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Since nothing is free, to each his price.
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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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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.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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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 word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.
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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
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I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
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It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
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I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
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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 worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
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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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