Gore Vidal: Use

“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

“Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.”

Gore Vidal

On the religious right in America 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)

Money , People , Fear , Religion

“I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 2: Fire Over England, p. 34

Nature

“It was ready-made for them to call an emergency and pretend it was war-time, you know, the war on terrorism is a metaphor, and terrorism is an abstract noun. It's like a "war on dandruff." There's no such thing, you know. It isn't war, it's just a slogan. But using the slogan they got through the U. S. A. Patriot Act, which removes many of our liberties. Nobody made a sound when we lost Habeas Corpus—due process of law—and suddenly Bush managed to get rid of it. Where was a voice on television, aside from mine, that spoke out against this? Where were all those noble jurists, those great lawyers, those lovers of liberty, where the hell were they? They were nowhere!”

Gore Vidal

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

War , Law , Lovers , Hell

“Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Gore Vidal

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

Business , Learning

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 12: The Guest of the Blue Nuns, p. 162

Age , Business , Memory

“Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?”

Gore Vidal

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

Dreams , Reality

“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

1990s, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)

People , Time

“After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.”

Gore Vidal

"Montaigne"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Time

“Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.”

Gore Vidal

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

“It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory.”

Gore Vidal

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

Quotes , Memory

“Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln's bowels, whose 'frequency,' he tells us, 'cannot be documented.' But, of course, they can. 'Truth-teller' Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence 'wrong.”

Gore Vidal

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

Truth , Dependency

“At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.”

Gore Vidal

"America First? America Last? America at Last?," Lowell Lecture, Harvard University (20 April 1992).
1990s

God , Hate , Quotes

“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

“Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life.”

Gore Vidal

"The Enemy Within" https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/EnemyWithin.html, The Observer (27 October 2002)
2000s

Life , Faith

“People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified — which is sometimes useful.”

Gore Vidal

2000s, What I've Learned (2008)

People , Reading

“I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).”

Gore Vidal

Preface http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/vidal_su95.html
1990s, The City and the Pillar and Seven Early Stories (1995)

“My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").”

Gore Vidal

"On Flying" (1985)
1980s, At Home (1988)

“Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.”

Gore Vidal

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 2

World , Education , Madness

“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.”

Gore Vidal

Appendix
1980s, At Home (1988)

God , Religion , People , Books