Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

— Gore Vidal

2. “The unfed mind devours itself.”

— Gore Vidal

3. “The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

6. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

8. “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.”

— Gore Vidal

9. “I’m a born – again atheist.”

— Gore Vidal

10. “When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

13. “I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.”

— Gore Vidal

14. “There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.”

— Gore Vidal

15. “When anyone says to me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ I say, ‘Why should I, if you can’t?’”

— Gore Vidal

16. “It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.”

— Gore Vidal

17. “I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible.”

— Gore Vidal

18. “The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized...”

— Gore Vidal

19. “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

20. “The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.”

— Gore Vidal

21. “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

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22. “Having no talent is no longer enough.”

— Gore Vidal

23. “I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party – the property party. It’s the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.”

— Gore Vidal

24. “History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.”

— Gore Vidal

25. “Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.”

— Gore Vidal

26. “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

27. “There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.”

— Gore Vidal

28. “Reality is something the human race doesn’t handle very well.”

— Gore Vidal

29. “You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque.”

— Gore Vidal

30. “Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.”

— Gore Vidal

31. “But women are always attracted to power. I do not think there could ever be a conqueror so bloody that most women would not willingly lie with him in the hope of bearing a son who would be every bit as ferocious as the father.”

— Gore Vidal

32. “I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”

— Gore Vidal

33. “The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.”

— Gore Vidal

34. “I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – good people.”

— Gore Vidal

35. “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

— Gore Vidal

36. “Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.”

— Gore Vidal

37. “In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death.”

— Gore Vidal

38. “We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn’t threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we’ve made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.”

— Gore Vidal

39. “Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major.”

— Gore Vidal

40. “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

— Gore Vidal

41. “I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”

— Gore Vidal

42. “Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.”

— Gore Vidal

43. “Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever.”

— Gore Vidal

44. “To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.”

— Gore Vidal

45. “Love is a fan club with only two fans.”

— Gore Vidal

46. “Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.”

— Gore Vidal

47. “I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.”

— Gore Vidal

48. “Never offend an enemy in a small way.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

50. “A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

— Gore Vidal