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Top Gore Vidal Quotes

Browse top 87 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Gore Vidal.

Favorite Gore Vidal Quotes

1. "Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth" ~ Gore Vidal
2. "Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head." ~ Gore Vidal
3. "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
4. "I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television." ~ Gore Vidal
5. "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." ~ Gore Vidal
6. "Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates." ~ Gore Vidal
7. "Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent." ~ Gore Vidal
8. "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." ~ Gore Vidal
9. "Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home." ~ Gore Vidal
10. "Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to beat war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless." ~ Gore Vidal
11. "It is not enough merely to win; others must lose." ~ Gore Vidal
12. "Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." ~ Gore Vidal
13. "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
14. "As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing--not art, not sex--more than going to the movies." ~ Gore Vidal
15. "The unfed mind devours itself." ~ Gore Vidal
16. "How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself." ~ Gore Vidal
17. "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." ~ Gore Vidal
18. "Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin." ~ Gore Vidal
19. "A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." ~ Gore Vidal
20. "By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over." ~ Gore Vidal
21. "Never have children, only grandchildren." ~ Gore Vidal
22. "Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale." ~ Gore Vidal
23. "The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so." ~ Gore Vidal
24. "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." ~ Gore Vidal
25. "We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing." ~ Gore Vidal
26. "Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange." ~ Gore Vidal
27. "anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]" ~ Gore Vidal
28. "In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death" ~ Gore Vidal
29. "If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well." ~ Gore Vidal
30. "Since nothing is free, to each his price." ~ Gore Vidal
31. "The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart." ~ Gore Vidal
32. "What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?" ~ Gore Vidal
33. "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
34. "I've always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.' And it's with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track." ~ Gore Vidal
35. "[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about." ~ Gore Vidal
36. "Ronald Reagan is a triumph of the embalmer's art." ~ Gore Vidal
37. "Christianity is such a silly religion." ~ Gore Vidal
38. "a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)" ~ Gore Vidal
39. "Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors." ~ Gore Vidal
40. "The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no." ~ Gore Vidal
41. "For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail." ~ Gore Vidal
42. "Sexual revelation in literature, must be tactful and must serve plot" ~ Gore Vidal
43. "I say his version because there is no such thing as a true account of anything. Each sees the world from his own vantage point. Needless to say, a throne is not the best place from which to view anything except the backs of prostrate men." ~ Gore Vidal
44. "As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope." ~ Gore Vidal
45. "In general, [. . .] novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries." ~ Gore Vidal
46. "...,I have never visited any city in the world where I was not told that I just missed the golden age. I seem never to be on time." Cyrus Sitema" ~ Gore Vidal
47. "...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
48. "I'm a born-again atheist." ~ Gore Vidal
49. "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
50. "Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral." ~ Gore Vidal
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I never loved the world around me as it was."
Author: Christian Lacroix

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Thin
Wit
Ear
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Act
Here
Ally
Use
Thou
Con
Hey
Ten
Lit
Self
Cause
End
Each
Hen
Era
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Sin
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Ours
King
Sex
Read
Los
Vision
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America
Side
President
Succeed
Less
Itself
Hum
Win
Fact
Book
Boo
Ways
Writing
Born
Miss
Sing
Bee
Place
Tell
Either
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