Gore Vidal Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Gore Vidal on Wise Famous Quotes.
Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
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.
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
I deny that there's such a thing as a gay person. I deny there's such a thing as a heterosexual person.
Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.
There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.
God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.
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.
My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.
To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.
The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
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.
He now new a number of people but none well. It was easier to have sex with a man than to acquire a friend.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.
As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing
not art, not sex
more than going to the movies.
not art, not sex
more than going to the movies.
True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."
We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.
The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.
I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.