25 Gore Vidal Quotes on Politics

Gore Vidal quotes on politics

3. At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

6. that peculiarly American religion, President-worship.

14. Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

17. My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ('They tell lies,' he used to say with wonder, 'even when they don't have to').

18. The last best hope on earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie 'answers' questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

20. 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.

24. Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

28. Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President - the same half?

30. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not only to conform but to consume.

31. I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.

34. Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

35. 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.

40. 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, 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. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.

41. Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

42. Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

43. We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

52. We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

53. Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States. He was everything they hated. So I just say that he represented life, and that is admirable; and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing.

54. We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

66. Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.

70. I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him.

72. When she was running for the Senate, Hillary's psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately - I heard she said, 'I remind them of their first wife.'

82. Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

83. My favorite sex fantasy is becoming president, so I can do it to two hundred million people at once.

85. Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them, either.