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“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 …”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978), p. 280

People , Question

“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.”

Gore Vidal
Books , Reading

“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

Gore Vidal

Quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, London (16 September 1973).
1970s
Variant: Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Time

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

Gore Vidal

Quoted by Gerard Irvine, "Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg," [memorial service for Driberg] (8 December 1976)
1970s
Variant: It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

“No good deed goes unpunished”

Gore Vidal

“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”

Gore Vidal

Source: Point to Point Navigation

Age , Sex , Appearance

“I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place”

Gore Vidal
Thinking

“Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”

Gore Vidal

Appendix
1980s, At Home (1988)
Context: 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 that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

Gore Vidal

Quoted in "Vidal: 'I'm at the Top of a Very Tiny Heap,'" profile by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times (12 March 1981), Late City Final Edition, Section C, Page 17, Column 1.
1980s

“Always a godfather, never a god.”

Gore Vidal
God

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”

Gore Vidal

Source: Death Before Bedtime

“To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.”

Gore Vidal

Source: At Home: Essays 1982-1988

“The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.”

Gore Vidal
Death , Religion , Idea

“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”

Gore Vidal

"Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas" (1980)
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)
Variant: In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice to those who ought not to write at all.
Source: The Essential Gore Vidal

Imagination , Thinking

“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.”

Gore Vidal
Perfection