As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.
GORE VIDAL, Twitter post, July 29, 2012
History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.
GORE VIDAL, Julian
A curious condition of a republic based roughly on the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.
GORE VIDAL, The United States of Amnesia
Never have children, only grandchildren.
GORE VIDAL, Palimpsest: A Memoir
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
GORE VIDAL, "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel", Encounter, December 1967
To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more diflicult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival.
GORE VIDAL, Esquire, 1961
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
