110+ Gore Vidal Quotes On Power, America And Provocative

Gore Vidal was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and political activist. He wrote many novels, plays, essays and screenplays, as well as political commentaries. He was known for his wit, his erudite style of writing, and his advocacy of liberal causes. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gore Vidal on love, power, america.

Top 10 Gore Vidal Quotes

1. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.
2. There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
3. Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
4. Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.
5. Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
6. We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
7. The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.
8. Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
9. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.
10. That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Gore Vidal Image Quotes

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild. — Gore Vidal

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

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Short Quotes

• At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
• Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
• A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
• Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn.
• All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
• To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
• I'm a born - again atheist.
• He's a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.
• First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.
• I assume that the point of American democracy is you can express any point of view you want.

Gore Vidal Quotes About Love

The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself. — Gore Vidal

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

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre. — Gore Vidal

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair. — Gore Vidal

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.' — Gore Vidal

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no'. — Gore Vidal

anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon] — Gore Vidal

Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies. — Gore Vidal

Love is a fan club with only two fans. — Gore Vidal

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About Power

Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes — Gore Vidal

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

USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. — Gore Vidal

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of — Gore Vidal

But women are always attracted to power. I do not think there could ever be a conqueror so bloody that most women would not willingly lie with him in the hope of bearing a son who would be every bit as ferocious as the father. — Gore Vidal

It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, while the wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About America

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died. — Gore Vidal

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are. — Gore Vidal

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy." — Gore Vidal

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

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please. — Gore Vidal

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy. — Gore Vidal

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961. — Gore Vidal

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

I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party - the property party. It's the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican. — Gore Vidal

What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world.... Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About People

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. — Gore Vidal

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. — Gore Vidal

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. — Gore Vidal

It makes no difference whom you vote for -- the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people. — Gore Vidal

These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also. — Gore Vidal

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since. — 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

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo -- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices. — Gore Vidal

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise. — Gore Vidal

Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About President

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

Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth — Gore Vidal

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days. — Gore Vidal

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

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions. — Gore Vidal

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. — Gore Vidal

That peculiarly American religion, President-worship. — Gore Vidal

When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what's going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it's trouble. Monkeys make trouble. — Gore Vidal

Nixon was a Southern Rim President, and so antipathetic to the old guard. — Gore Vidal

I'd still like to be the President, of course, and I think the best way to do that would be to raise an army and seize the Capital. This strikes me as true democracy. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About World

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. — Gore Vidal

To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder. — Gore Vidal

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. — Gore Vidal

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil. — Gore Vidal

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

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

All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world. — Gore Vidal

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

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent. — Gore Vidal

Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About Writing

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. — Gore Vidal

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them. — Gore Vidal

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself. — Gore Vidal

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it. — Gore Vidal

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

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. — Gore Vidal

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. — Gore Vidal

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith. — Gore Vidal

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink. — Gore Vidal

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Quotes About Television

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel. — Gore Vidal

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. — Gore Vidal

Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. — Gore Vidal

I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television. — Gore Vidal

Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions. — Gore Vidal

There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television. — Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal Famous Quotes And Sayings

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system. — Gore Vidal

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild. — Gore Vidal

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

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so. — Gore Vidal

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. — Gore Vidal

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to"). — Gore Vidal

All the other candidates are making speeches about how much they have done for their country, which is ridiculous. I haven't done anything yet, and I think it's just common sense to send me to Washington and make me do my share. — Gore Vidal

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." — Gore Vidal

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government) — Gore Vidal

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. — Gore Vidal

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more. — Gore Vidal

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

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die. — Gore Vidal

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. — Gore Vidal

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

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. — Gore Vidal

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us. — Gore Vidal

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state. — Gore Vidal

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

Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life's way... and if you don't, you've been sort of cheated. — Gore Vidal

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing. — Gore Vidal

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. — Gore Vidal

Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media. — Gore Vidal

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe. — Gore Vidal

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors. — Gore Vidal

In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter. — Gore Vidal

Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects. — Gore Vidal

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves. — Gore Vidal

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. — Gore Vidal

You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one. — Gore Vidal

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. — Gore Vidal

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers. — Gore Vidal

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

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized. — Gore Vidal

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences. — Gore Vidal

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant. — Gore Vidal

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes. — Gore Vidal

Next to "I win," "I told you so" are the sweetest words. — Gore Vidal

Populists have never had a good press in Freedom's land. — Gore Vidal

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now. — Gore Vidal

I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water. — Gore Vidal

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults. — Gore Vidal

A good deed never goes unpunished. — Gore Vidal

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem. — Gore Vidal

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

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth. — Gore Vidal

Never have children, only grandchildren. — Gore Vidal

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

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool. — Gore Vidal

It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life. — Gore Vidal

What is a political party but a conspiracy? — Gore Vidal

Life Lessons by Gore Vidal

1. Gore Vidal taught us to never be afraid to express our opinions, no matter how unpopular they may be. He also taught us to never be afraid to challenge the status quo and to always stand up for what we believe in. Lastly, he reminded us that we should always strive to be independent thinkers and to never let anyone else dictate our beliefs.