"I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us."
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Quote collection
Gore Vidal quotes (page 3 of 23)
457 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died."
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"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
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"There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil."
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"It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead."
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"There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic."
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"All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself."
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"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."
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"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them."
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"Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home."
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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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"These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also."
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"For half a century photography has been the "art form" of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?"
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"To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder."
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"First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me."
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"He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices."
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"In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are."
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"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."
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"True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know."
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"Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state."
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