Gore Vidal Quotes

Author Image

Gore Vidal

Profession : Novelist

Birth : October 3, 1925

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.

Gore Vidal

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

Gore Vidal

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

Gore Vidal

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Gore Vidal

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.

Gore Vidal

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

Gore Vidal

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

Gore Vidal

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Gore Vidal

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

Gore Vidal

'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

Gore Vidal

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Gore Vidal

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.

Gore Vidal

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.

Gore Vidal

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Gore Vidal

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

Gore Vidal

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.

Gore Vidal

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

Gore Vidal

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Gore Vidal

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Gore Vidal