Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

162. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

164. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

166. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

171. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

178. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

188. “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.”

— Gore Vidal

189. “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

190. “I’m not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. You very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution.”

— Gore Vidal

191. “That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.”

— Gore Vidal

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

195. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

197. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

199. “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

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

— Gore Vidal