Top 15 Gore Vidal Quotes

The unfed mind devours itself.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

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

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

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

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

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.

No good deed goes unpunished

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

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