Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.”

— Gore Vidal

102. “Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”

— Gore Vidal

103. “Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.”

— Gore Vidal

104. “Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.”

— Gore Vidal

105. “Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.”

— Gore Vidal

106. “To have an interest in both sexes is equally normal. Whether it’s practiced or not is something else. Some do. Some don’t.”

— Gore Vidal

107. “True history,” said Hearst, with a smile that was, for once, almost charming, “is the final fiction. I thought even you knew that.”

— Gore Vidal

108. “When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.”

— Gore Vidal

109. “Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.”

— Gore Vidal

110. “USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.”

— Gore Vidal

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111. “Since a president can do wrong and since he can be named in debate, he is not an anointed king and so like any man is answerable to the law.” John Marshall then summoned President Jefferson to Richmond.”

— Gore Vidal

112. “I look into my own black heart.”

— Gore Vidal

113. “The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It’s a metaphor. It’s not about anything.”

— Gore Vidal

114. “It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.”

— Gore Vidal

115. “If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.”

— Gore Vidal

116. “I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.”

— Gore Vidal

117. “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”

— Gore Vidal

118. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelet,” said Butler sententiously.”

— Gore Vidal

119. “The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.”

— Gore Vidal

120. “A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man’s eyes to the nature of human existence.”

— Gore Vidal

121. “Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can’t always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies.”

— Gore Vidal

122. “Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an IQ of 60.”

— Gore Vidal

123. “We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

125. “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.”

— Gore Vidal

126. “Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.”

— Gore Vidal

127. “As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.”

— Gore Vidal

128. “Poor John Simon – what a nightmare, to wake up in the morning and realize that you are John Simon.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

131. “I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.”

— Gore Vidal

132. “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”

— Gore Vidal

133. “I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.”

— Gore Vidal

134. “The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn’t be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.”

— Gore Vidal

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135. “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.”

— Gore Vidal

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136. “For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?”

— Gore Vidal

137. “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

138. “How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

— Gore Vidal

139. “I’m devoted to promiscuity, and always have been. I believe the more you do, the better it is for you. I’m a great health nut, and sex is, I think, absolutely marvelous for the whole system; tones you up.”

— Gore Vidal

140. “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.”

— Gore Vidal

141. “Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states.”

— Gore Vidal

142. “Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us.”

— Gore Vidal

143. “Before the word gay had really been invented, was there’s no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters – based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions – would they make categories. Everybody’s everything.”

— Gore Vidal

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144. “On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”

— Gore Vidal

145. “By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.”

— Gore Vidal

146. “A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren’t they?”

— Gore Vidal

147. “Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.”

— Gore Vidal

148. “Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.”

— Gore Vidal

149. “Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.”

— Gore Vidal

150. “I don’t see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.”

— Gore Vidal