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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a32b3a2 | weaving his verbal wreaths, in prose and verse, of marvellous poison ivy. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 88bb3ad | The next week both small pox and the bloody flux began to go through the camp. General Washington maintained that the flux came from drinking new cider. But the cider-drinking continued, and so for that matter did the flux, which is a terrible death, the bowels emptying out one's life in bloody spasms. I | Gore Vidal | ||
| c44ba67 | Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." --Gore Vidal" | Douglas E. Richards | ||
| 346ccbd | It is ironic-rouse the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come yo care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take "hard" drugs on the potential ground that they are bad for the user's health. One is touched by their concern- touched and dubious. After all, these same compassion.. | health politics | Gore Vidal | |
| f29b968 | I had a sudden premonition that this might be the night he drank himself to death. After he finished one bottle, he fumbled the porcelain decanter of single malt out of its velvet-lined box, hands shaking, fingers trembling. He barely managed to peel off the foil, then couldn't unscrew the cap. I didn't offer to help. I hoped he'd give up. In frustration, he bashed the bottle against the fireplace, cracking off the cap, and drank straight f.. | Michael Mewshaw | ||
| ff7f85d | believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing." In" | James Edmonds | ||
| 0425c74 | The people have no voice because they have no information. --Gore Vidal | Real Network | ||
| 76c1675 | JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn't a coup; it was a many-year process. I'm not suggesting we're living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned. VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don't be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstag fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration's people. "And if we don't fight them over there, we got to fight 'em here." This little fool. How are they going .. | Real Network | ||
| 1942d24 | JAY: No, I'm talking about the leadership of the Democratic Party went along with the Patriot Act, went along with the war in Iraq. VIDAL: Have you ever found them? You know where they live? JAY: The leadership of the Democratic Party? VIDAL: You know, they're not visible. There's some obviously good people in the party. I like Dennis Kucinich, I like Senator Leahy. There are some very good people in Congress. And let's hope they start doin.. | Real Network | ||
| bce15a0 | Yeah, that's the new lie that they like to tell. Well, that's Bush all the time. They just hate us. Why? Nobody has to ask them why. He doesn't know why. "Well, they envy us, our form of government." Who envies us? That can of worms we've got in Washington? And it's been many years in the United States since I have seen a Norwegian coming to get a green card." | Real Network | ||
| 8c16058 | The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people. None of whom should probably be elected to the high offices of state. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked. --Gore VidaI | Real Network | ||
| 4e00117 | I was born eighty years ago in a country called the United States of America and now I live in a Homeland--an expression we haven't heard since Hitler. --Gore Vidal | Real Network | ||
| 994abe8 | JAY: How significantly different would a Clinton White House, Obama White House, or an Edwards White House--how much can they do? How much do they want to do differently? VIDAL: It's too broken. The first thing you have to do is get back habeas corpus. You've got to get back the Magna Carta, you've got to get back our legal system, you've got to get back the pillars of the Constitution, and they're gone. Republics don't restore themselves. | Real Network | ||
| b71c3cb | You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. And the Republican machine became so good at transmitting its own feelings about the world to the enemy, to the liberals, once anyone, any of the right wing hear what I just said, he'll say, "Oh, the liberals have always hated America. We know that. They despise family values, because they're only interes.. | Real Network | ||
| 7fba344 | JAY: You've been touring the country after your new book. VIDAL: Well, no, I was touring it before the last congressional election to raise money for the Democratic Party. Not that I like the Democratic Party, but we have to have the semblance of a second party to get rid of these others. | Real Network | ||
| 0a40ca2 | thought Gore would put up a better fight, since it is in our genetic heritage to battle these things. He seemed so overwhelmed at being thought a sore loser. Well, if you've lost the presidency when you've already gained the popular vote by several hundred thousand votes, and the Electoral College, as everybody knows, an easily manipulated bad joke at our expense, a present from our founding fathers to make sure that we never have democracy.. | Real Network | ||
| 78a58e1 | After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. | Gore Vidal | ||
| c403b5d | Boy, we got the Democrats on that one. And habeas corpus? Don't try it again. You'll stay in Guantanamo as long as we want you there, because, you see, you could be a terrorist." And they chuckle among themselves, holding innocent people. But it's--they're orgasmic with delight at how they are getting rid of the Bill of Rights and holding people who should not be held, and then blaming an innocent fool like Kerry for being a coward, when th.. | Real Network | ||
| edd662b | The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories--gay and straight. | Gore Vidal | ||
| d75c965 | FBI slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 7d33e3a | Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television. | Gore Vidal | ||
| ed6dcfc | I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom .. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 5ae14d7 | You know, any time I want to get applause--and I lecture across America in state after state after state--when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, "And another thing: let us tax all the religions." I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption." -- | Real Network | ||
| a777fe8 | I enjoy comedic invention, both high and low, there is almost nothing quite so satisfying as making an audience laugh while removing its insides. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 0cf8902 | Well, today we're in a peculiar limbo, and since 9/11 things that have never happened to us before have started to happen. Nine/eleven, whoever is behind it--I assume it's Osama bin Laden and some Muslim fanatics--but whoever's behind it is not important, as you can tell. We haven't tried to find him, for one thing. If he were important, we would. So it means our own government doesn't--doesn't much care. But 9/11 proved to be a pretext for.. | Real Network | ||
| af164cd | The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money--and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse." I suppose, if nothing else, I was" | Gore Vidal | ||
| e2af703 | we're sort of like somebody going along--I don't know--in a mine field, you know, dropping matches, just dropping matches, waiting-- waiting to hear the bang. Well, the bang might take us all out. So as we have chatted our way through much of American history in the course of this conversation, I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us, remember that practically everything that you're told about other countries is unt.. | Real Network | ||
| c539904 | A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill.. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 40bcf2e | We are in danger of government by professional office-holders ... | Gore Vidal | ||
| 4827dbc | I remember my grandfather, who was chairman of that committee--I forget what he had done to get to that stage, but he was chairman of agriculture. And the guy who ran the Grange, which is like a collective for farmers across the country, would always begin by addressing the committee by saying, "Senator, for the last twenty years, the crops have been below average." My grandfather would roar with laughter, and the Grange never knew what he .. | Real Network | ||
| 5d2f061 | You rather despair, because he who tries to tell the truth is called the biggest liar of all. Machiavelli, that kindly old cynic, came up with some wonderful advice in The Prince, which has been taken seriously by--Karl Roverino, I believe, is probably his correct name. Mr. Rove and company have taken up the fact that the bigger the lie, the more apt it is to be believed. So they're always stretching it, kind of: "You don't think that'll wo.. | Real Network | ||
| 914997c | Cheney is not an idiot. He just has a character problem. | Real Network | ||
| 9139994 | There was Democratic thought, and there was Republican thought, and there was liberal thought, and there was conservative thought. Politics was never very big, because we were a culture stirring. Culture is a lot more important than politics, though if you have bad politics, you cannot have good culture, but we didn't know then the roots of the bad politics that were flourishing in our national security state. | Real Network | ||
| 0cce600 | President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 89690b5 | Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. "We are good," G.W. proclaims, "They are evil," which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them--as well as with the re.. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 9bdaacf | Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?). But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist coconspirators who wa.. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 3a6de62 | Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now "at war" with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done b.. | Gore Vidal | ||
| af6c7d4 | But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight. | Gore Vidal | ||
| ad87291 | Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent. Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results. A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness a.. | Gore Vidal | ||
| 9e767ad | Even | Henning Mankell | ||
| 19a7ac5 | If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. -- Joseph Goebbels | Gregory Wrightstone | ||
| c54cf21 | Democrats comprised 37% of voting electorate in 200 compared with 46% in 1960. If the electorate of 2000 had the same balance of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents as the electorate of 1960, Gore would have won an additional 3% of the vote. | democrats elections republicnas | Donald P. Green | |
| c26a725 | The meal began with pickled squid, oyster shooters, marinated anchovies, and scungilli salad. Then Rosalie set an enormous bowl of pasta con le vongole in front of Sal, who ladled it out, talking the entire time. The pasta was followed by huge platters of scampi, which we passed around. It was almost eleven when Rosalie set three enormous stuffed turbots on the table, and it was near midnight when she appeared with a plate of warm sugar-dus.. | italian new-year-s-eve seafood | Ruth Reichl | |
| 424822a | And I still believe, to the core of my being, that when you pay attention, cooking becomes a kind of meditation. | Ruth Reichl |