Gore Vidal - American Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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Patriotism is as sickening today as it has ever been. I was watching the news before you came and there was a lot of coverage of Kosovo and the problems there. They showed footage of people burning an American flag. And the newscaster got all broken up and teary-eyed. He says, "I guess [sob] I just feel something here, folks, when I see the American flag being burned." And I said, You fucking asshole. Whatever happened to the news?

Gore Vidal
I assume that the point of American democracy is you can express any point of view you want.

Gore Vidal
There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.

Gore Vidal
When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

Gore Vidal
The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.

Gore Vidal
Americans are farcical when it comes to force majeure and money!
Two things that they worship.
You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.

Gore Vidal
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Gore Vidal
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

Gore Vidal
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

Gore Vidal
That peculiarly American religion, President-worship.

Gore Vidal
Americans prefer their writers obscure, poor, and, if possible, doomed by drink or gaudy vice. All the things I'm not.

Gore Vidal
We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

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

Gore Vidal
You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.

Gore Vidal
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Gore Vidal
... American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Gore Vidal
Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President — the same half?

Gore Vidal
That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Gore Vidal
The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.

Gore Vidal