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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
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
Individual
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Casual
World
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Events
More quotes by Gore Vidal
If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.
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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
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Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
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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.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
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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?
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Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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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.
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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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Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.
Gore Vidal
Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
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The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.
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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
Gore Vidal
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
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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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