Gore Vidal: Trending quotes (page 6)

“Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.”

Gore Vidal

2000s, What I've Learned (2008)

Religion , Country

“That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.”

Gore Vidal

"President and Mrs. U.S. Grant" (1975)
1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978)

Religion

“We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

Gore Vidal

"The State of the Union," The Nation (13 September 2004)
2000s

Law , Dead

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

Gore Vidal

"Writing Plays for Television" in New World Writing, #10 (1956)
1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972)

People , Problem , Heart

“I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”

Gore Vidal

TV interview with David Frost and quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine 16 September 1973 http://books.google.com/books?id=4cl5c4T9LWkC&lpg=PA754&q=%22I'm+all+for+bringing+back+the+birch+but+only+between+consenting+adults%22&pg=PA754#v=onepage
1970s

“Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 8

Men

“What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when black were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom’s land much less bravery’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.”

Gore Vidal

"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Age , School , Color , Home

“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.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 1, Libanius to Priscus, Antioch March 380

Way

“We are all so simple at heart that become unfathomable to one another.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 7

Heart

“They already had contingency plans ready in case of terrorism, violence, whatever, which they had inherited from Clinton, who had put together some terrible legislation after Timothy McVeigh blew up the building in Oklahoma City.”

Gore Vidal

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

“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

"Love Love Love," Partisan Review (Spring 1959)
1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972)

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

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 1, Libanius to Priscus, Antioch April 380

“Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 18: To Do Well What Should Not Be Done at All, p. 311

Madness

“Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves.) And did not De Profundis plumb for all time the shallows of the most reported love affair of the past hundred years, rivalling even that of Wallis and David, its every nuance (O Bosie!) known to all, while trembling rosy lips yet form, over and over again, those doom-laden syllables The Cadogan Hotel?”

Gore Vidal

Oscar Wilde. Yet again. Why?
Opening lines to "Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Love , Life , Hate , Time

“No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us…Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 5

Truth

“Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation.As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 7: "Today My Nerves Are Shattered. But I Am Indomitable!," pp. 107-108

Reading

“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

2000s, What I've Learned (2008)

Secret

“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.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 5

Thinking

“We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.”

Gore Vidal

2000s, What I've Learned (2008)

Way

“Well, remember, all that area from which the Gore family comes was solid Democrat and progressive under Roosevelt for several decades. So they just didn't become Republicans because they all wanted to be bankers. They became it because they didn't like black people, and they thought the Democrats were pushing integration too fast. And that's how the great split came about, to the shame of the whole country.”

Gore Vidal

On the American South's switch from Democrat to Republican http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

People , Family , Country