Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing.”

— Gore Vidal

102. “Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.”

— Gore Vidal

103. “One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.”

— Gore Vidal

104. “Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

109. “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

110. “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

111. “A court is the most depressing place on earth. Wherever there is a throne, one may observe in rich detail every folly and wickedness of which man is capable, enameled with manners and gilded with hypocrisy.”

— Gore Vidal

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.”

— Gore Vidal

117. “In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. New formulas just like the scientist. But that isn’t science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road.”

— Gore Vidal

118. “I confess to not having listened to a word of the Declaration of Independence. At the time I barely knew the name of the author of this sublime document. I do remember hearing someone comment that since Mr. Jefferson had seen fit to pledge so eloquently our lives to the cause of independence, he might at least join us in the army. But wise Tom preferred the safety of Virginia and the excitement of local politics to the discomforts and dangers of war.”

— Gore Vidal

119. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

123. “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

124. “Everybody is bisexual, and that is a fact of human nature. Some people practice both, and some practice one thing, and some people practice another thing and that is the way human beings are.”

— Gore Vidal

125. “Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

128. “A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is ability to articulate human relationships.”

— Gore Vidal

129. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

133. “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

134. “Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.”

— Gore Vidal

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

139. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

141. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

143. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

148. “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

149. “If ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a homegrown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: ‘Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he’s bad news, but you can’t hurt people’s feelings. They buy soap, too.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal