Gore Vidal quotes

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. (Gore Vidal)
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
Gore Vidal
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
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
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
Never have children, only grandchildren.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
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
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
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. (Gore Vidal)
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
Gore Vidal
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
Gore Vidal
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
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
A good deed never goes unpunished.
Gore Vidal
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true. (Gore Vidal)
Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
Gore Vidal
I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.
Gore Vidal
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country - and we haven't seen them since.
Gore Vidal
You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Gore Vidal