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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.

— Gore Vidal The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)

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More quotes by Gore Vidal

Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?

Julian (1964)

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972)

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Julian (1964)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gore Vidal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.