Top 400 Gore Vidal Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Gore Vidal

262. “I believe it’s my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.”

— Gore Vidal

263. “There is no such thing as a true account of anything.”

— Gore Vidal

264. “Americans worship the Constitution but do not observe it.”

— Gore Vidal

265. “I don’t deny or affirm anything. I’m not very personal.”

— Gore Vidal

266. “If you’re a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.”

— Gore Vidal

267. “People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It’s generally wrong. Or oversimplified – which is sometimes useful.”

— Gore Vidal

268. “You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: ‘Where are the readers?’”

— Gore Vidal

269. “I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.”

— Gore Vidal

270. “Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.”

— Gore Vidal

271. “Gentlemen are not supposed to tell the truth about their sex lives, nor are ladies, for that matter. Of course Clinton lied – as would anybody in his position.”

— Gore Vidal

272. “As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.”

— Gore Vidal

273. “To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”

— Gore Vidal

274. “As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.”

— Gore Vidal

275. “I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.”

— Gore Vidal

276. “Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.”

— Gore Vidal

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

— Gore Vidal

278. “We wear the purple.”

— Gore Vidal

279. “I realize,” said Sumner, “that the press is hardly reliable.” Lincoln turned from the window; suddenly, he grinned. “Oh, yes, they are. They lie. And then they re-lie. So they are nothing if not re-lie-able.”

— Gore Vidal

280. “I’m in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars.”

— Gore Vidal

281. “How hungrily we read about ourselves!”

— Gore Vidal

282. “Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people’s lives, it’s a great subject.”

— Gore Vidal

283. “Vitriolic is a needless and malign attack on something, excessive attack on something. It is a rather pointless thing to do.”

— Gore Vidal

284. “It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.”

— Gore Vidal

285. “Nothing is durable, I think anybody who thinks sex is durable is going to have a lot of grief.”

— Gore Vidal

286. “I liked the trichotomy, that’s the only thing I ever liked.”

— Gore Vidal

287. “When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.”

— Gore Vidal

288. “To be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved.”

— Gore Vidal

289. “I was brought up to believe that what is out-of-doors should stay there and not be encouraged in any way.”

— Gore Vidal

290. “Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.”

— Gore Vidal

291. “I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that’s how one starts. Or I started.”

— Gore Vidal

292. “We have a great deal to learn from Scandinavia and a great deal to be alarmed at from the Mediterranean.”

— Gore Vidal

293. “All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.”

— Gore Vidal

294. “The tragedy of the United States, thus far in this century, is not the crack-up of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

— Gore Vidal

295. “I come from the highest class of all. I am a third-generation celebrity.”

— Gore Vidal

296. “I don’t seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I’m realistic.”

— Gore Vidal

297. “Many years ago, there used to be something called ‘conflict of interest.’ No longer, I’m afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river.”

— Gore Vidal

298. “I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it’s too discouraging.”

— Gore Vidal

299. “The American vice is explanation.”

— Gore Vidal

300. “I would not be surprised if elephants are more intelligent than human beings. After all, their heads are larger than ours, and the fact that they do not speak might well be an indication of superiority.”

— Gore Vidal