Gore Vidal Quotes

After all, as educated men, we should realize that myths always stand for other things. They are toys for children teething. The man knows that the toy horse is not a true horse but merely suggests the idea of a horse to a baby's mind. When we pray before the statue of Zeus, though the statue contains him as everything must, the statue is not the god himself but only a suggestion of him. Surely, as fellow priests, we can be frank with one another about these grown-up matters.

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 ...

Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society.

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.

The size of the population of course has much to do with this collective ignorance. When Aristophanes made a satiric point, he could be confident that his audience would appreciate his slyest nuance because in a small community each citizen was bound to share with his fellows a certain amount of general information, literary, religious, and political. National units today are too large and, in America at least, education is too bland to hope for much change.

KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully.

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.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

"Is it not better for a man never to have been born?"
"Certaintly not" The response was brisk. "Just to be able to study the sky is reason enough to be alive."
"Unfortunately, I can't see the sky."
"Then listen to music."

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

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.

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.