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The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.

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
Like
Absolutely
Sex
Shake
Americans
Shakes
Subjects
Hung
Class
Whenever
Start
British
Comes
English
Really
Subject

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I said, well, it's a very primitive country, the United States, and it's full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
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We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.
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I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
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France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.
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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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Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
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What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?
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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.
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Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
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For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
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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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There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
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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.
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I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
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To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it's practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don't.
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In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.
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Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
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I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
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Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
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Envy is the central fact of American life.
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