To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.
GORE VIDALIn character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
-
-
A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
GORE VIDAL -
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
GORE VIDAL -
The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it has been much studied.
GORE VIDAL -
Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
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 -
The unfed mind devours itself.
GORE VIDAL -
To invent a war means that you’ve become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.
GORE VIDAL -
I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
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 -
Corporations must pay tax.
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 -
I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
GORE VIDAL -
Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
GORE VIDAL -
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.
GORE VIDAL -
What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.
GORE VIDAL