Gore Vidal's Quotes

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

Gore Vidal

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Gore Vidal

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Gore Vidal

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Gore Vidal

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

Gore Vidal

Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.

Gore Vidal

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

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

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

Gore Vidal

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

Gore Vidal

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Gore Vidal

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal

Friends, there is no Left in American politics.

Gore Vidal

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.

Gore Vidal

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.

Gore Vidal

I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.

Gore Vidal

I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.

Gore Vidal

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

Gore Vidal

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

Gore Vidal

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Gore Vidal

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

Gore Vidal