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

“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.”
Gore Vidal

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

“Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.”
Gore Vidal

“A good deed never goes unpunished.”
Gore Vidal

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”
Gore Vidal

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”
Gore Vidal

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

“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.”
Gore Vidal

“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.”
Gore Vidal

“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.”
Gore Vidal

“Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.”
Gore Vidal

“I’m a born-again atheist.”
Gore Vidal

“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.”
Gore Vidal

“Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us that we are a classless society in which everyone can make it.”
Gore Vidal

“The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.”
Gore Vidal

“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.”
Gore Vidal

“Christianity is such a silly religion.”
Gore Vidal

“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.”
Gore Vidal