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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.

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
Except
Enthusiasts
Dangerous
Dogmas
Less
Militant
Order
Imposed
Ends
Attempting
Good
Dogma
Customs
Harm
Supplant

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All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
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Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.
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Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
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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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Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
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There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, Well, so-and-so will like this, which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
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Never offend an enemy in a small way.
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I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
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Traitors who prevail are patriots usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
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Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
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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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In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.
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The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.
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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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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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One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
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To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
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In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
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