Gore Vidal
The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.Collection: Money
Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.Collection: Religion
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 less what anyone says about you, then it's not courage.'Collection: Courage
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.Collection: War
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.Collection: Truth
I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.Collection: Movies
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.Collection: Politics
Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.Collection: Hope
'The Turner Diaries' is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.Collection: Teacher
I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it's true that I am, by nature, belligerent.Collection: Anger
Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead.Collection: Wedding
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.Collection: Sad
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.Collection: Politics
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.Collection: Car
Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.Collection: Government
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.Collection: Politics
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.Collection: Politics
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.Collection: Chance
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.Collection: Government
Friends, there is no Left in American politics.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'
Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.
I began life as an absolute monarchist - on condition, of course, that I be that monarch.
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.
There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.
After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king's death or upon the identity of his successor.
No sooner does an American president take his oath of office than the speculation begins: Will he be reelected in four years' time? If not, who will succeed him? A member of his own party? The other party?
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 what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.
An important governorship used to be the best springboard for would-be presidents.
There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.
For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.
Most of our writers tend to be recorders.
McCain is significant in the sense that he has no significance at all on any subject.
I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is consideration for the welfare of others.
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
He who is last had best laugh.
The media can't get anything straight.
I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is.
The United States is a madhouse.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
Envy is the central fact of American life.
Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.
There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.