Gore vidal quotes

The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

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.

Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

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").

Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts.

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be.

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

If you're a critic of the rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the press, and they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.

Politics is made up of two words: "Poli," which is Greek for "many," and "tics," which are bloodsucking insects.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no.'

Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy."

We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.

It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

The fool is often oblivious of his own gaucherie.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death

Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.

The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.

There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public.

It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes

The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything.

Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

I assume that the point of American democracy is you can express any point of view you want.

They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?

In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.

The problem with most Americans is that they don't like any question that takes more than ten seconds to answer.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

The unfed mind devours itself.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

These people [Bush Administration] are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they're all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.

Since nothing is free, to each his price.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run.

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.

Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.

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.

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.

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.

Those who have not undergone minor disasters are usually being held in reserve for something major

The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.

USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through.

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt - until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe.

In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

I am savage about what has been done to the United States by its rulers.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist - I’m a conspiracy analyst.

Never offend an enemy in a small way.

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.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.

There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

But women are always attracted to power. I do not think there could ever be a conqueror so bloody that most women would not willingly lie with him in the hope of bearing a son who would be every bit as ferocious as the father.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.

The same people own the media that own the White House that own the Congress that own the oil fields. They all work together to give a false view of the world to the American people.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Since there is no system of public education, the great majority of my fellow citizens is frighteningly ignorant. They have no idea where Iraq is. They accept as the gospel whatever the government tells them. Good grief, any other normal country would have been against the Iraq war! But we live in an abnormal country, governed by experts in deceptive advertising.

Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth

It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

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.

That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.