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Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

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
Made
Century
Never
Politics
People
Sure
Half
Truth
Government
Mention
Anything
Rulers
Done
Told

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What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.
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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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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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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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You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.
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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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As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
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You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
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I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
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Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
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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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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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You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.
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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
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I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
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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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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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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.
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Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
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