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Never offend an enemy in a small way.

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
Offend
Enemy
Small
Way
Never

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.
Gore Vidal
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By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
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I'm in favor of sexual encounters.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
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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No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.
Gore Vidal
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal
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I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.
Gore Vidal
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The Gores, I think, are a bit brighter than the Bushes, historically speaking.
Gore Vidal
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When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
Gore Vidal
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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
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Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal