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Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

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
Occasional
Criticism
Expense
Continue
Expenses
Flower
Warning
Impetuous
Times
Weed
Indiscriminate
Warnings
Confident
Weeds
Flowers
Cultivation
Despite

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By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
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Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.
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Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
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As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
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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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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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We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.
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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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Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
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Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
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Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
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As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.
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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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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
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a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)
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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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The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism.
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It is not enough merely to win others must lose.
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