Quotes from Gore Vidal

Jews, blacks and homosexuals are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world.

Remember, I'm West Point, where I was born. My father went there.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

It is always a delicate matter, when a friend or acquaintance becomes president.

We're not a democracy.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.

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.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel's thriller 'Seven Days in May,' later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House.

I don't know how prisoners of war are ever heroes unless they escape.

It is a paradox of the acquisitive society in which we now live that although private morals are regulated by law, the entrepreneur is allowed considerable freedom to use - and abuse - the public in order to make money.

During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.

I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.

Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death