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Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.

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
Population
Longer
American
Half
Plainly
Reads
Newspapers
Clever

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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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Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
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Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.
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Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.
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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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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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...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
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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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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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[Norman Mailer] is against masturbation, he's against homosexuality. He believes that murder is essentially sexual. I think he's rather an anthology of all the darkest American traits.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
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I look into my own black heart.
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No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.
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Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
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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.
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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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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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