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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
Reads
Newspapers
Clever
Population
Longer
American
Half
Plainly

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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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.
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I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
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Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word democracy.
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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.
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For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one's friends must fail.
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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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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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It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
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That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.
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Baum (Writer of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) was a true educator, and those who read his Oz books are often made what they were not-imaginative , tolerant, alert to wonders, life.
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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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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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There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.
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People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.
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The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.
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American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
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The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans in the New World, of course, they could and did.
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True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
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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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