"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."
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Quote collection
Gore Vidal quotes (page 2 of 23)
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"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."
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"USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through."
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"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."
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"Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well."
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"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to")."
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"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.""
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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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"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."
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"Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)"
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"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."
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"The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible."
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"At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area."
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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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"Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die."
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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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"Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers."
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"You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?"
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"Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes"
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