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Realism has always been called cynicism.

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
Realism
Cynicism
Called
Always

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Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
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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.
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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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The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.
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To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
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I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.
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Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
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Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied - as would anybody in his position.
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One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.
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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.
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I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.
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No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
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I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.
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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.
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Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am. Actually I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth. I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible. But people like to re-invent you, according to cliché.
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Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
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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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That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.
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