"By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him."

Gore Vidal Literature See all quotes by Gore Vidal →

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“Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.”

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”

“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”

“In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.”

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make i…"

— Kenneth E. Iverson

Science1920–2004

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"I didn't get up from the corner of my study couch until I discovered a unique and dangerous nexus between the Naxal mafia and middlemen disguised as intellectuals. Like Prasoon would have desired, I h…"

— Vivek Agnihotri

Entertainment1973

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"The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and ther…"

— John Templeton

Business1912–2008

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"While most of these intellectuals have taken public stances against racism and white supremacy, have opposed Nazism and apartheid South Africa, seem to oppose colonialism, old and new, most of them pa…"

— Joseph Massad

Education1963

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