Quotes by Gore Vidal

“Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood an...”

“Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.”

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied ...”

“Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. ...”

“Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagans library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadnt finished coloring either one of them.”

“It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.”

“Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.”

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, b...”

“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”

“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.”

“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 exting...”

“We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but m...”

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”

“I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.”

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

“I'm a born-again atheist.”

“Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist...”

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify ...”

“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 nothi...”

“Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.”