Gore Vidal Quotes

...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

~ Gore Vidal

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those liberals who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

~ Gore Vidal

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

~ Gore Vidal

I have never been an eavesdropper, even in childhood. Not from any sense of virtue but because I really do not want to know what people think of me or, to be precise, what they say of me - often a different matter. I can usually imagine the unpleasant judgements, for we are what others needs us to be. That is why our reputations change so often and so drastically, reflecting no particular change in us, merely a change in the mood of those who observe us.

~ Gore Vidal

A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.

~ Gore Vidal

Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.

~ Gore Vidal

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

~ Gore Vidal

...Leggett feels that to be excitingly right in general is better than to be dully accurate in particular. That is why he is such an effective journalist.

~ 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

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

~ Gore Vidal

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

~ Gore Vidal

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

~ Gore Vidal

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

~ Gore Vidal

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

~ Gore Vidal

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.

~ 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

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

~ Gore Vidal

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

~ Gore Vidal

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.

~ Gore Vidal

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

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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.

~ Gore Vidal

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

~ Gore Vidal

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

~ Gore Vidal