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I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.

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
Opposite
Opposites
Violent
Revolution
Bring
Real
Always
Revolutions
Seldom

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People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.
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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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There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
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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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The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.
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I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.
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The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.
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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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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
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Never have children, only grandchildren.
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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.
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Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know I've done it myself.
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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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Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.
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I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
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I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
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By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success
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Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated.
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As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
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Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.
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