Gore Vidal quotes:

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.

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 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.

I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

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

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.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

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.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

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.

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.

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.

What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.

I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'

In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.

Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.

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.

The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

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

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst.

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.

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

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

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

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Friends, there is no Left in American politics.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.

As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Corporations must pay tax.

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

The media can't get anything straight.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

The United States is a madhouse.

The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.

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

Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

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

I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.

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

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.

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.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

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

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?

Every country should have at least one King Farouk.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.

You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.

My family is Southern. I'm used to Bill Clintons.

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

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink lambdas.

Gossip is conversation about people.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.

Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.

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

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

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.

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

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.

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character...

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

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

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

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.

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

Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

I'm a born - again atheist.

First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.

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."

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful.

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.

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

In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.