Gore Vidal Quotes

...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

As for our Ouija-board Supreme Court, it would be nice if they would take time off from holding séances with the long-dead founders, whose original intent so puzzles them, and actually examine what the founders wrought, the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states.

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

It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.

POWERS: No, I’ve seen it happen before too many times. Mr. Kreton, if there is one thing that destroys an army’s morale and discipline, it is a major war. Everything goes to hell. Lose more damn sheets and pillowcases. Your laundry’s a wreck!

Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.

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.

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.

If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money!
Two things that they worship.
You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.