Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. – Gore Vidal
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. – Gore Vidal
Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent. – Gore Vidal
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening. – Gore Vidal
Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again. – Gore Vidal
From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion. – Gore Vidal
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are. – Gore Vidal
Temperamentally, I am suspicious of belonging to anything. When I ran for office, I debated seriously whether or not to run as an independent because I was not eager to be saddled with the Democratic Party, because any party label is committing. – Gore Vidal
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible. – Gore Vidal
Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it. – Gore Vidal
What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives. – Gore Vidal
I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water. – Gore Vidal
Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. – Gore Vidal
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. – Gore Vidal
If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected. – Gore Vidal
To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. – Gore Vidal
In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup – reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro’s Cuba. – Gore Vidal
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. – Gore Vidal
We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually. – Gore Vidal
Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it. – Gore Vidal
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn’t have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps – all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm. – Gore Vidal
Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East. – Gore Vidal