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I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic.

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
Seem
Goes
Others
Seems
Problem
Cynical
Realistic

More quotes by Gore Vidal

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It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
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You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.
Gore Vidal
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France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.
Gore Vidal
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Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.
Gore Vidal
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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.
Gore Vidal
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Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.
Gore Vidal
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The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
Gore Vidal
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
Gore Vidal
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Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.
Gore Vidal
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I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
Gore Vidal
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Poor John Simon - what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.
Gore Vidal
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World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.
Gore Vidal
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Gore Vidal