“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”
― 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
“Actually, 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
“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
“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: ‘Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.’ Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”
― Gore Vidal
“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”
― Gore Vidal
“The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.”
― Gore Vidal
“Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society…. To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”
― Gore Vidal
“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”
― Gore Vidal
“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”
― Gore Vidal
“The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.”
― Gore Vidal
“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
― Gore Vidal
“Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing.”
― Gore Vidal on John Lennon and Richard Nixon.
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”
― Gore Vidal
“By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.”
― Gore Vidal
“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
― Gore Vidal
