Gore Vidal

“The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.”

“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 el...”

“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 th...”

“It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the p...”

“Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.”

“You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right - constitutional right.”

“Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than...”

“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...”

“Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.”

“We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.”

“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at the galaxy's edge... there is all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance w...”

“My father once said something very shrewd about me to a woman journalist who had told him how courageous she thought I was for always speaking my mind. My father said, 'If you couldn't care...”

“What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular go...”

“By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.”

“Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.”

“It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.”

“World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with...”

“Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.”

“Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the...”

“The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.”