The quotations of

Gore Vidal

American writer

1925–2012

10 quotes, most often on America.

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.
“Writing Plays for Television” in New World Writing, #10 (1956)
- Advice
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1970)
- America
- Writing
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
“Gods and Greens” (1989)
- Democracy
- Voting
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.
“Love Love Love,” Partisan Review (Spring 1959)
- Work
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.
Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), Ch. 12: The Guest of the Blue Nuns, p. 162
- Age
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
“Gods and Greens” (1989)
- Nature
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
“Cue the Green God, Ted” (1991).
- America
- Journalism
Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism.
Screening History (1992), Ch. 1: The Prince and the Pauper, p. 24
- Charity
- Money
Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that’s the end of the constitution as a working machine.
“America First? America Last? America at Last?,” Lowell Lecture, Harvard University (20 April 1992)
- Government
- War & Peace
They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.
Julian (1964), Chapter 4
- Knowledge

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