The Best Man Gore Vidal Quotes

#1. Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

Edmund White

#2. Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Gore Vidal

#3. In the town of Ravella, where I have a house, when the Supreme Court said that an act of sodomy, as they describe it, could not be committed between a man and his wife, the entire square burst into laughter.

Gore Vidal

#4. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

Gore Vidal

#5. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

Gore Vidal

#6. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.

Gore Vidal

#7. I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

Richard Russo

#8. It is not about the money. It's the public service aspect. Absolutely, I think it has qualities of redemption. The city gets a second chance. I get a second chance.

John Rowland

#9. 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.

Gore Vidal

#10. For me, movies should be visual. If you want dialogue, you should read a book.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#11. He glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.

Jodi Picoult

#12. He now new a number of people but none well. It was easier to have sex with a man than to acquire a friend.

Gore Vidal

#13. From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#14. How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#15. By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

Gore Vidal

#16. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we
the white race
have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.

Gore Vidal

#17. A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.

Gore Vidal

#18. For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.

Gore Vidal

#19. Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.

Adam Smith

#20. It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

Gore Vidal

#21. Is it not better for a man never to have been born?"
"Certaintly not" The response was brisk. "Just to be able to study the sky is reason enough to be alive."
"Unfortunately, I can't see the sky."
"Then listen to music.

Gore Vidal

#22. It is natural for men to want power. But to seek power actively takes a temperament baffling to both the simple and the wise. The simple cannot fathom how any man would dare presume to prevail, while the wise are amazed that any reasonable man would want the world, assuming he could get it.

Gore Vidal

#23. It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Gore Vidal

#24. No matter what face he wears, Satan has one overmastering ambition, one burning desire-to dethrone the Almighty and to place himself upon the highest throne of the universe.

Adrian Rogers

#25. I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.

Gene Tierney

#26. I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.

Jay Parini

#27. I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.

Will Rogers

#28. Doing the right thing has power.

Laura Linney

#29. Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

Gore Vidal