Gore Vidal quotes - page 6

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults. (Gore Vidal)
One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things. View quote
Gore Vidal
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. View quote
Gore Vidal
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all. View quote
Gore Vidal
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president. View quote
Gore Vidal
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil. View quote
Gore Vidal
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers. View quote
Gore Vidal
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel. View quote
Gore Vidal
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself. View quote
Gore Vidal
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds. View quote
Gore Vidal
a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist) (Gore Vidal)
The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable. View quote
Gore Vidal
...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another. View quote
Gore Vidal
It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U. S. A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus-due process of law-and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere! View quote
Gore Vidal
Well, the Constitution has not yet been pregnant. View quote
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. View quote
Gore Vidal
I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass. View quote
Gore Vidal
Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality? View quote
Gore Vidal
Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind. View quote
Gore Vidal
After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays-attempts-to assay-value-himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing. View quote
Gore Vidal
On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact. (Gore Vidal)
Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince? View quote
Gore Vidal
You think of the Republican Party as a party, like the British Conservative Party - well it isn't! I don't say that the British Conservative Party is much better, I'm only saying the Republican Party is a mindset. They love war! They love money! They're out to hang on through all the connections that they have, through their various operatives. View quote
Gore Vidal
The founding fathers were not interested in democracy, in fact, in a country with 3 1/4 million people, which is about what we were at the time of the separation from England, only 700,000 people could vote - white males of property. So it's never been terribly democratic. ...and they put together a constitution which would protect property for all time. No nonsense about democracy! View quote
Gore Vidal
The late Mr. [Carl] Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank ("Ker-oh-seen!" he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine - ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness. View quote
Gore Vidal