A concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume.
--Gore Vidal
A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
--Gore Vidal
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
--Gore Vidal
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
--Gore Vidal
Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.
--Gore Vidal
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
--Gore Vidal
Anybody who's not paranoid is not in full possession of the facts.
--Gore Vidal
Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
--Gore Vidal
As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.
--Gore Vidal
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
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
--Gore Vidal
Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family.
--Gore Vidal
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
--Gore Vidal
Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.
--Gore Vidal
Each of us contains a private self and a public self. When the two have not met, their host tends to be average... amiable, self-deluding and given to sudden attacks of melancholy whose origin he does not suspect. When the two selves openly disdain each other, the host is apt to be a strong minded opportunist.....when the selves wrangle, the host is more a man of conscience than of action. When the two are in fierce and total conflict, the host is a lunatic or a saint.
--Gore Vidal
Envy is the central fact of American life.
--Gore Vidal
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
--Gore Vidal
Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
--Gore Vidal
Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President- the same half?
--Gore Vidal
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
--Gore Vidal
History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
--Gore Vidal
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.
--Gore Vidal
I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.
--Gore Vidal
I have found that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough.
--Gore Vidal
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
--Gore Vidal
I'm never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.
--Gore Vidal
If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.
--Gore Vidal
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
--Gore Vidal
It makes no difference who you vote for- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
--Gore Vidal
Least said, soonest mended.
--Gore Vidal
Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
--Gore Vidal
Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.
--Gore Vidal
My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general. 'They tell lies,' he used to say with wonder, 'even when they don't have to.'
--Gore Vidal
My father warned me never to date a girl who called her mother Mummy. So I dated her brother and lived happily ever after.
--Gore Vidal
Never have children, only grandchildren.
--Gore Vidal
Next to 'I win,' 'I told you so' are the sweetest words.
--Gore Vidal
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
--Gore Vidal
Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is.
--Gore Vidal
Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.
--Gore Vidal
Some bastards have been great presidents.
--Gore Vidal
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
--Gore Vidal
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.
--Gore Vidal
Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.
--Gore Vidal
The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
--Gore Vidal
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity- much less dissent.
--Gore Vidal
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
--Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
--Gore Vidal
The unfed mind devours itself.
--Gore Vidal
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country- and we haven't seen them since.
--Gore Vidal
The very phrase, 'a famous novelist' is like saying, 'a famous ceramicist.' The adjective is inappropriate to the noun.
--Gore Vidal
There is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
--Gore Vidal
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them, either.
--Gore Vidal
We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.
--Gore Vidal
We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.
--Gore Vidal
We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.
--Gore Vidal
What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
--Gore Vidal
Write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.
--Gore Vidal
You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.
--Gore Vidal
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.
--Gore Vidal
Found 59 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).