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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

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
Political
Governors
Order
Invented
Much
Drugs
Seizure
Make
Vulnerable
Prohibit
Would
Population
Seizures
Property
Arrest
Drug
Imprisonment
Exist
Prohibition

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Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
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Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
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What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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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.
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Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
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I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
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Politics is made up of two words: Poli, which is Greek for many, and tics, which are bloodsucking insects.
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Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.
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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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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.
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If you're not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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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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