Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.”

— Gore Vidal

202. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

204. “Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that’s the end of the constitution as a working machine.”

— Gore Vidal

205. “Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.”

— Gore Vidal

206. “All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.”

— Gore Vidal

207. “The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.”

— Gore Vidal

208. “There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

210. “In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.”

— Gore Vidal

211. “One’s neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.”

— Gore Vidal

212. “Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you. – Twitter post, July 29, 2012.”

— Gore Vidal

213. “The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving – Italo Calvino.”

— Gore Vidal

214. “Next to “I win,” “I told you so” are the sweetest words.”

— Gore Vidal

215. “Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, “I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.” We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

217. “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

— Gore Vidal

218. “I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground.”

— Gore Vidal

219. “I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.”

— Gore Vidal

220. “Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard.”

— Gore Vidal

221. “The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.”

— Gore Vidal

222. “Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente.”

— Gore Vidal

223. “In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.”

— Gore Vidal

224. “Realism has always been called cynicism.”

— Gore Vidal

225. “People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.”

— Gore Vidal

226. “Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one’s family.”

— Gore Vidal

227. “Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

— Gore Vidal

228. “The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.”

— Gore Vidal

229. “Soon he would move on.”

— Gore Vidal

230. “Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.”

— Gore Vidal

231. “No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.”

— Gore Vidal

232. “I’m in favor of sexual encounters.”

— Gore Vidal

233. “On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”

— Gore Vidal

234. “I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.”

— Gore Vidal

235. “If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.”

— Gore Vidal

236. “France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.”

— Gore Vidal

237. “The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

239. “For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

241. “I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.”

— Gore Vidal

242. “The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.”

— Gore Vidal

243. “Come to me and show me a small cancer and I’ll tell you you’ve got a small cancer that should be cut out. That’s realism but in America it’s called cynicism.”

— Gore Vidal

244. “Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society – that is decadence.”

— Gore Vidal

245. “Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you’ve been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.”

— Gore Vidal

246. “You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

— Gore Vidal

247. “After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.”

— Gore Vidal

248. “It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.”

— Gore Vidal

249. “Politically, of course, it’s to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.”

— Gore Vidal

250. “We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”

— Gore Vidal