Gore Vidal Quotes

Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind.

...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.

By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him.

It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory.

They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed.

Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?

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 good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.

The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.

...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own.

Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!

One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

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