Quotes from Gore Vidal

postwar managers: if you want to avoid depression, spend money on war. No one told them that the same money spent on the country's infrastructure would have saved us debt, grief, blood.

If you want, let's say, to deny the people certain rights, keep them ignorant of the Bill of Rights. If nobody understands who we were, we won't question why we are what we are. ... [I]t's to the interest of the oligarchs --- the national security statespersons --- keep the people ignorant.

Mrs. Todd was a pretty if coarse-looking girl with thick brows, an endearing husky laugh and rather too much flesh on her bones for my taste, which often rules me but is no tyrant.

Gözler kapal?yken, gerçek dünya baÅŸlar.

There was indeed a vast conspiracy to maneuver an essentially isolationist country into war. There was also a dedicated conspiracy to destroy Lindbergh's reputation as hero.

The vice-presidential carriage arrived, splattering us sternly but justly with mud.

Finally, the physical damage Osama and friends can do us—terrible as it has been thus far—is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.

At first Madison was shy but Mrs. Todd soon warmed him up, filled his glass again and again with my best claret.

This morning I reread the last section, trying to see it objectively, to match what I have put down with the memory I still bear of that first encounter with John Cave. I have not, I fear, got it. But this is as close as I can come to recalling long-vanished emotions and events.

I was passing in the street and thought I'd bring you the news straight from the port. Lafayette is dead!" "One cannot say that he was taken before his time. We must restrain our grief.

gave Mr. Davis belladonna to stop the pain—

And at some length Dr. Bogart spoke of a period in which skies were bluer, water purer, potatoes better-grained than now. I know the speech. It is the tirade of the old.

And they think you saints are all rubes! What's a rube? A holy man.

The unfed mind devours itself

I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created—the television commercial—and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.

Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.

We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.