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This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

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
First
Easily
Phrases
Giving
Sky
Republic
Direct
Onto
Trust
Separation
Violation
Actually
Originals
Amendment
Religion
Absolutes
Amendments
Give
Original
Phrase
Firsts
Absolute
Currency

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I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir (I am not my own subject, I used to say with icy superiority).
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In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
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People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
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In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.
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I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy.
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It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
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I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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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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I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
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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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Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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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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Come to me and show me a small cancer and I'll tell you you've got a small cancer that should be cut out. That's realism but in America it's called cynicism.
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What begins with comedy ends with comedy... in my short view of the matter.
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Never offend an enemy in a small way.
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Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
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The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
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Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
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