Quotes from Gore Vidal

Democritus is studying philosophy here at Athens. This means that he delights in quarrels.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man's life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

A good deed never goes unpunished.

For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.

He was, as soldier and man, all of a piece

No, not death. We have chosen life eternal, the resurrection of the...' 'That is a story to tell children. The truth is that for thousands of years we looked to what was living. Now you look to what is dead, you worship a dead man and tell one another that this world is not for us, while the next is all that matters. Only there is no next world.

In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. New formulas just like the scientist. But that isn't science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road.

presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman.

Many years ago, there used to be something called 'conflict of interest.' No longer, I'm afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river.

It is my task always to know, particularly when I don't.

What matters finally is not the world's judgement of oneself but one's own judgement of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive very long in America

In politics, as in love, opposites attract, and the misunderstandings that ensue tend to be as bitter and, as in love, as equally terminal.

After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did.

Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente

T]hose who are not by nature hunters side with the hunted.

Soon he would move on.

My memory plays me odd tricks these days [...] Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.

To want power is corruption already.

Contrary to accepted legend, the Philadelphians did not at all mind the presence of the British army in their city; in fact, many of them hoped that Washington would soon be caught and hanged, putting an end to those disruptions and discomforts which had been set in motion by the ambitions of a number of greedy and vain lawyers shrewdly able to use as cover for their private designs Jefferson's high-minded platitudes and cloudy political theorizings. Shortly

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.

In other words, if public opinion is not unduly aroused one may safely set aside the Constitution and illegally arrest one's enemies. Had this letter been published at the time, an excellent case might have been made for the impeachment and removal of a president who had broken that oath he had taken to defend and to protect the Constitution by conspiring to obstruct and pervert the course of justice.

To Jefferson the Constitution was simply a convenience when it allowed him to do what he wanted to do, and a monarchical document when it stayed his hand. He regarded domestic government as the business of the states and foreign affairs as the business of the Executive, and he was naïve enough in those days to think that the two businesses could be kept separate.

All things turn out ill, in the end. But that is the ill nature of things, to end.