Gore Vidal Quotes

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

The unfed mind devours itself.

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

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.

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

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

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.

It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.

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.

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

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.

Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

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

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.

To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.

First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

I'm a born - again atheist.

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

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

I assume that the point of American democracy is you can express any point of view you want.

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.