On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
GORE VIDALSince we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
-
-
There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL -
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
GORE VIDAL -
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
GORE VIDAL -
Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
I could be a lot happier. I could be the senator from Aerospace taking bribes, and be quite happy.
GORE VIDAL -
You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
For the record, I’m a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
GORE VIDAL -
I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.
GORE VIDAL -
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
GORE VIDAL -
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
GORE VIDAL -
There’s a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.
GORE VIDAL -
I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
GORE VIDAL -
In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
GORE VIDAL -
Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
GORE VIDAL -
The unfed mind devours itself.
GORE VIDAL