Quotes from Gore Vidal

This is not at all bad, except as prose.

claims to abominate slavery and to regard secession as treason." "He will fight very well, sir," said General Scott, gloomily. "It is a matter of honor." "I see," said Lincoln, who plainly did not

I am alone in my study. I have already put away Julian's papers. The thing is finished. The world Julian wanted to preserve and restore is gone... but I shall not write forever, for who can know the future? Meanwhile, the barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were has fled. So be it.

So here they are, trying to get us into the army again to get us to fight in Europe, but the country is isolationist. One of the reasons why the world has been demonized is because they had to do it. The average American is an isolationist.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

At times, she felt that she was involved in an elaborate peasant dance, which had not been entirely explained to her. Now the hand is held; now the heel is stamped; now the head turns; and then the kiss.

As the great questions were always posed in the same way, they invited answers that were equally predictable and unchanging.

In 1989 the former drug czar and TV talk-show fool, William Bennett, suggested de jure as well as de facto abolition of habeas corpus in "drug" cases as well as (I am not inventing this) public beheadings of drug dealers.

Whenever I hear the word 'smegma', I become physically ill.

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

and the people. Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and honorable in all and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thoro' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.

He became the permanent scourge of what he called the "slaveocracy.

A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill of Rights.

He now new a number of people but none well. It was easier to have sex with a man than to acquire a friend.

Stay Longer and you will hear the beginning of your death

Talleyrand was notorious for taking bribes. But then he was endlessly practical. He liked to lecture the young foreign office clerks on the necessity of masturbating before coming to work, thus ensuring unclouded minds at least throughout the morning.

weaving his verbal wreaths, in prose and verse, of marvellous poison ivy.

Yolculuk garip ?ey, bir kez ba?lad?n m? bitiremiyorsun. Alkolizm gibi bir ?ey.

Tu quoque is the best defense.]

Actually, the law can be approached as if it were a kind of garden," said Seward. "You must recall where and when you plant each seed …

I waited alone in a cold ante-room. Aides came and went, including General Knox who bestowed on me his fish eye as he went inside.

FBI slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise.

I suspect Cromwell was right: the man who does not know where he's going goes farthest.

It is customary for emperors who listen to bishops to hurl insults at the very civilization that created them.