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Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.

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
Upon
Although
Paternal
Father
Concepts
Totalitarian
Give
Notion
Reminds
May
Comfort
Daddy
Need
Authority
Grounded
Giving
Rest
Concept
Needs
Leader
Absolutes
Society
Absolute

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[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
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Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
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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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I have never been particularly impressed by the self centered musings of my fellow writers.
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They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?
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Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
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We must declare ourselves, become known allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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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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I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
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By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.
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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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The only absolute attainment is absolute abandonment.
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Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
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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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I think we're going to have to accept the fact the U.S. is off the world map. We are not a great player any longer. And when we come home - as we will have to do because we've run out of money - we will discover that Argentine debts means Argentine politics. And on that note, you can wake up in the middle of the night.
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Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
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Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
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Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.
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