Top 90 Gore Vidal Quotes

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy’s edge… there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

Corporations must pay tax.

I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.

Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the ‘To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance’ kind of thing.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.

Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use – and abuse – the public in order to make money.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist – I’m a conspiracy analyst.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.

Americans, in general, are ignorant, bigoted, and deeply unhappy with their declining incomes.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government’s mischief… the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.

I’m always an optimist!

Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better… next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for ‘progress;’ it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.

I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

I don’t know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

TV news is not very instructive.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar – and not dissimilar – sphere of operations.

We’re not a democracy.

The media can’t get anything straight.

To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.

I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Most of our writers tend to be recorders.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

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.

I didn’t mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I’d rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

My family is Southern. I’m used to Bill Clintons.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

I can understand companionship.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

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.

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup – reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro’s Cuba.

The only thing that I react really violently to is being misquoted.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.