Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Vitriolic really is personal. I am vitriolic. I am savage.”

— Gore Vidal

152. “Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I’m a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

155. “Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s is the wrong one.”

— Gore Vidal

156. “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”

— Gore Vidal

157. “In politics, as in love, opposites attract, and the misunderstandings that ensue tend to be as bitter and, as in love, as equally terminal.”

— Gore Vidal

158. “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.”

— Gore Vidal

159. “I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”

— Gore Vidal

160. “The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.”

— Gore Vidal

161. “The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.”

— Gore Vidal

162. “Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.”

— Gore Vidal

163. “The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.”

— Gore Vidal

164. “Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.”

— Gore Vidal

165. “President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.”

— Gore Vidal

166. “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

— Gore Vidal

167. “God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.”

— Gore Vidal

168. “Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.”

— Gore Vidal

169. “The worst thing to happen to Lincoln – aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford’s theatre – was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

— Gore Vidal

170. “Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one’s own cherished beliefs.”

— Gore Vidal

171. “Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.”

— Gore Vidal

172. “The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.”

— Gore Vidal

173. “I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth.”

— Gore Vidal

174. “We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

176. “What is a political party but a conspiracy?”

— Gore Vidal

177. “If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.”

— Gore Vidal

178. “I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.”

— Gore Vidal

179. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

— Gore Vidal

180. “The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really – class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.”

— Gore Vidal

181. “The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid. Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.”

— Gore Vidal

182. “By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.”

— Gore Vidal

183. “Envy is the central fact of American life.”

— Gore Vidal

184. “American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.”

— Gore Vidal

185. “True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don’t know quite as well as you know what you do know.”

— Gore Vidal

186. “I have been on the cover of Time magazine. My father was on the cover of Time, and my grandfather was on the cover of Time.”

— Gore Vidal

187. “I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That’s my substitute for television.”

— Gore Vidal

188. “I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.”

— Gore Vidal

189. “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

190. “I’m a much worse guest than I am a host, and I’m not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone.”

— Gore Vidal

191. “One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.”

— Gore Vidal

192. “There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.”

— Gore Vidal

193. “The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.”

— Gore Vidal

194. “Who gives a damn about being remembered? That’s really for amateurs.”

— Gore Vidal

195. “Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is part of our nature and not worth fretting about.”

— Gore Vidal

196. “As I now move, graciously, I hope, towards the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”

— Gore Vidal

197. “We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.”

— Gore Vidal

198. “Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.”

— Gore Vidal

199. “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.”

— Gore Vidal

200. “Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.”

— Gore Vidal