Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.
Gore Vidal
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Gore Vidal
Age: 86 †
Born: 1925
Born: October 3
Died: 2012
Died: July 31
Actor
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Politician
Prosaist
West Point
New York
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Gor Vidal
Cameron Kay
Eugene Luther Vidal
Edgar Box
Katherine Everard
Eugene Vidal
Men
Preferable
Occurred
Enlightenment
Figure
Figures
Century
Law
Never
Eighteenth
More quotes by Gore Vidal
Although the notion of one god may give comfort to those in need of a daddy, it reminds the rest of us that the totalitarian society is grounded upon the concept of God the father. One paternal god, one paternal leader. Authority is absolute.
Gore Vidal
The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything.
Gore Vidal
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in.
Gore Vidal
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.
Gore Vidal
I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.
Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal
Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any. We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
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
[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
Gore Vidal
The unfed mind devours itself.
Gore Vidal
To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Gore Vidal
Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
Gore Vidal
USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
Gore Vidal
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
Gore Vidal
It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.
Gore Vidal
True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.
Gore Vidal
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
Gore Vidal
Nothing human is finally calculable even to ourselves we are strange.
Gore Vidal
The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
Gore Vidal
