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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

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
Success
Pull
Together
Perfectly
Italians
Absolutes
Demonstrating
Disaster
Cope
Absolute
Astonishing
Deal
Begun
Deals
Inability
Ability
Balanced

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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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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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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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People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.
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Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.
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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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I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
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We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.
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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.
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I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.
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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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What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.
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There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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