Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

204. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

207. “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

209. “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

210. “There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.”

— Gore Vidal

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

216. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

222. “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

223. “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

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224. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

228. “Realism has always been called cynicism.”

— Gore Vidal

229. “There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.”

— Gore Vidal

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

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

235. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

237. “Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

241. “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

242. “These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I’m writing, I don’t politick.”

— Gore Vidal

243. “Soon he would move on.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

246. “This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.”

— Gore Vidal

247. “In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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250. “The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am.”

— Gore Vidal