Gore Vidal History Quotes

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.

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.

It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

Everybody with an IQ above room temperature is onto the con act of our media. They are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public—which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing. —Gore Vidal

As I now move, graciously, I hope, towards the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.

True history," said Hearst, with a smile that was, for once, almost charming, "is the final fiction. I thought even you knew that.

the bandits own the media,” said Gore. “And the media tells them that America is the greatest country in the world. Well, it sure as hell isn’t, at least not for the people who live in it. But the media are there cheerleading, ‘These are the greatest guys on earth.’ The infantilizing of the republic is one of the triumphs of American television.

I’m not joking when I refer to our country as the United States of Amnesia, although I was corrected recently by Studs Terkel out of Chicago. And he said, “Gore, it’s not the United States of Amnesia; it’s the United States of Alzheimer’s.” I stand corrected.

The Federalist Papers are very clear. Whenever one of the founding fathers and one of the people who was inventing the Constitution, they start to get apoplectic at the mention of Athens, the mention of Pericles, the mention of democracy. They go on and on about mobs, and we don’t want this, and we don’t want that. We’re an oligarchy of the well-to-do. We were at the very beginning, when the Constitution was made, and we’re even more so now.

It is a law of physics (still on the books when last I looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature—that is, history.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White’s strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison

It is customary for emperors who listen to bishops to hurl insults at the very civilization that created them.

Nothing man invents can last forever, including Christ, his most mischievous invention.

History is gossip, but the trick is determining which gossip is history.

I am alone in my study. I have already put away Julian's papers. The thing is finished. The world Julian wanted to preserve and restore is gone... but I shall not write "forever", for who can know the future? Meanwhile, the barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were has fled. So be it.

A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Well, the trick of the national security state is, first of all, there must always be an enemy, and he’s—must be terrifying, and he wants to blow us up because he’s evil and we’re good. So every day we are brainwashed: The Russians have discovered antigravity, or they’ve done this, or they’ve done that, and they’re evil; we are good, as well as overweight. Things—little things like this matter a great deal in advertising. Great advertising campaign to keep ourselves fully armed to the teeth.

AFTER HAMILTON’S DEATH, I remained at Richmond Hill for ten days. I confess that I was not prepared for the response to our interview. Apparently no one had ever fought a duel in the whole history of the United States until Aaron Burr invented this diabolic game in order to murder the greatest American that ever lived (after George Washington, of course). Over night the arrogant, mob-detesting Hamilton was metamorphosed into a Christ-like figure with me as the Judas—no, the Caiaphas who so villainously despatched the godhead to its heavenly father (George Washington again) at Weehawk, our new Jerusalem’s most unlikely Golgotha. I

Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history’s neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatized by Aeschylus in Eumenides (a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN). Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes. He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN—also known as the citizens’ assembly at Athens—which he does and is acquitted on the ground that blood feuds must be ended or they will smolder forever, generation after generation, and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until “the thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood ... and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time.” Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage.

It’s a great scandal of the CEOs, who are simply bandits. They go into a company that had a rich base, grab everything they can for themselves, stock options, huge salaries, fire as many people as possible. If we ever have an oldfashioned revolution in the United States, it will be made by well-educated blue-collar workers who have lost their jobs.

JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn’t a coup; it was a many-year process. I’m not suggesting we’re living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned. VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don’t be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstag fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration’s people. “And if we don’t fight them over there, we got to fight ’em here.” This little fool. How are they going to get here? Greyhound bus? I mean, he is so stupid himself that he assumes everybody else is equally stupid. If he had been really elected, I would say everybody else was stupid, but he wasn’t.

Although the founders were often good classicists, they took as a model for the American republic the pre-Julius Caesar Roman Republic. For the record, our word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia, which means, literally, “people-power.” History’s only democracy was instituted at Athens in 508 B.C. by Cleisthenes. Every male citizen over eighteen years of age was a citizen, able to gather with his fellows on a hillside, where, after listening to various demagogues, he could vote with the other citizens on matters of war and peace and anything else that happened to be introduced that day. In 322 B.C. Alexander of Macedon conquered Athens and eliminated their democracy, which was never again to be tried by a proper state (as opposed to an occasional New England town meeting). Current publicists for the American Empire have convinced themselves that if other nations, living as they do in utter darkness, would only hold numerous elections at enormous cost to their polity’s plutocracy (or to the benign empire back of these exercises), perfect government would henceforward obtain as The People had Been Heard: one million votes for Saddam Hussein, let us say, to five against. Although the Athenian system might now be revived through technology, voting through some sort of “safe” cybersystem, no one would wish an uneducated, misinformed majority to launch a war, much less do something meaningful like balance the budget of Orange County, California. One interesting aspect of the Athenian system was the rotation of offices. When Pericles told Sophocles, the poet-dramatist, that it was his turn to be postmaster general or some such dull office, Sophocles said he was busy with a play and that, besides, politics was not his business. To which the great Pericles responded, the man who says politics is no business of his has no business.

We’ve always been an oligarchy of the well-to-do and are becoming even more so now. What freedoms we had have now been eliminated—Magna Carta guaranteed us due process of law, the only good thing England left us. —Gore Vidal

Magna Carta guarantees due process of law. You cannot have your life removed, you cannot have your money removed, your freedom removed, except by a trial by jury of your peers, and you could be represented by legal counsel

thought Gore would put up a better fight, since it is in our genetic heritage to battle these things. He seemed so overwhelmed at being thought a sore loser. Well, if you’ve lost the presidency when you’ve already gained the popular vote by several hundred thousand votes, and the Electoral College, as everybody knows, an easily manipulated bad joke at our expense, a present from our founding fathers to make sure that we never have democracy, that the people will never rule. And that’s why the Electoral College was invented, that’s why they retain it: It’s too convenient.

You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. And the Republican machine became so good at transmitting its own feelings about the world to the enemy, to the liberals, once anyone, any of the right wing hear what I just said, he’ll say, “Oh, the liberals have always hated America. We know that. They despise family values, because they’re only interested in gang bangs and drugs and so forth.” This is the way they deal. And whenever they have a real coward for president, like Bush himself, and you have a hero like Kerry, “Oh, he’s a coward. Didn’t you know that? We’ve got five guys who were in Vietnam with him.” What they do is whatever is their transgression, whatever are their faults, they lie and apply it to the other person. That confuses everything.

Boy, we got the Democrats on that one. And habeas corpus? Don’t try it again. You’ll stay in Guantánamo as long as we want you there, because, you see, you could be a terrorist.” And they chuckle among themselves, holding innocent people. But it’s—they’re orgasmic with delight at how they are getting rid of the Bill of Rights and holding people who should not be held, and then blaming an innocent fool like Kerry for being a coward, when the only thing in his favor is that he was a very brave man in a war that I certainly wouldn’t have volunteered to be in one of those boats.

we’re sort of like somebody going along—I don’t know—in a mine field, you know, dropping matches, just dropping matches, waiting— waiting to hear the bang. Well, the bang might take us all out. So as we have chatted our way through much of American history in the course of this conversation, I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us, remember that practically everything that you’re told about other countries is untrue; what we’re told about ourselves and our great strength and how much loved we are, forget it.

Cheney is not an idiot. He just has a character problem.

I was born eighty years ago in a country called the United States of America and now I live in a Homeland—an expression we haven’t heard since Hitler. —Gore Vidal

JAY: How significantly different would a Clinton White House, Obama White House, or an Edwards White House—how much can they do? How much do they want to do differently? VIDAL: It’s too broken. The first thing you have to do is get back habeas corpus. You’ve got to get back the Magna Carta, you’ve got to get back our legal system, you’ve got to get back the pillars of the Constitution, and they’re gone. Republics don’t restore themselves.

JAY: You’ve been touring the country after your new book. VIDAL: Well, no, I was touring it before the last congressional election to raise money for the Democratic Party. Not that I like the Democratic Party, but we have to have the semblance of a second party to get rid of these others.

You rather despair, because he who tries to tell the truth is called the biggest liar of all. Machiavelli, that kindly old cynic, came up with some wonderful advice in The Prince, which has been taken seriously by—Karl Roverino, I believe, is probably his correct name. Mr. Rove and company have taken up the fact that the bigger the lie, the more apt it is to be believed. So they’re always stretching it, kind of: “You don’t think that’ll work? My God, it did.” Then they go out and take polls, and things are working. Machiavelli—I was reminded of it.

There was Democratic thought, and there was Republican thought, and there was liberal thought, and there was conservative thought. Politics was never very big, because we were a culture stirring. Culture is a lot more important than politics, though if you have bad politics, you cannot have good culture, but we didn’t know then the roots of the bad politics that were flourishing in our national security state.

I remember my grandfather, who was chairman of that committee—I forget what he had done to get to that stage, but he was chairman of agriculture. And the guy who ran the Grange, which is like a collective for farmers across the country, would always begin by addressing the committee by saying, “Senator, for the last twenty years, the crops have been below average.” My grandfather would roar with laughter, and the Grange never knew what he was laughing at—the absence of norms, of course.

Well, today we’re in a peculiar limbo, and since 9/11 things that have never happened to us before have started to happen. Nine/eleven, whoever is behind it—I assume it’s Osama bin Laden and some Muslim fanatics—but whoever’s behind it is not important, as you can tell. We haven’t tried to find him, for one thing. If he were important, we would. So it means our own government doesn’t—doesn’t much care. But 9/11 proved to be a pretext for getting rid of the old republic, which has not been in very good shape for a long, long time, starting with the national security state, which made us a totally militarized society—that’s Harry Truman. And ever since, we just go further and further along the road toward total war for nearly everybody. Now we’re in a strange, strange situation. There is nothing in our history to guide us; we’ve never been in this situation in which one gang basically has seized power. We’ve been very lucky: never—we’ve had dictators before. Lincoln was a dictator, but he was a dictator of the republic. The republic still stood when he was dictator, and we needed him. Franklin Roosevelt was a dictator, and we needed him. And they were—only briefly were they dictators. Now we have a dictatorial system, as best personified by the USA Patriot Act, which just removes us of our Bill of Rights. This is the most serious thing that has happened in the history of the United States, and how we get out of it’s anyone’s guess.

The people have no voice because they have no information. —Gore Vidal

JAY: No, I’m talking about the leadership of the Democratic Party went along with the Patriot Act, went along with the war in Iraq. VIDAL: Have you ever found them? You know where they live? JAY: The leadership of the Democratic Party? VIDAL: You know, they’re not visible. There’s some obviously good people in the party. I like Dennis Kucinich, I like Senator Leahy. There are some very good people in Congress. And let’s hope they start doing some oversight. But I’m not very sanguine.

Yeah, that’s the new lie that they like to tell. Well, that’s Bush all the time. They just hate us. Why? Nobody has to ask them why. He doesn’t know why. “Well, they envy us, our form of government.” Who envies us? That can of worms we’ve got in Washington? And it’s been many years in the United States since I have seen a Norwegian coming to get a green card.

The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people. None of whom should probably be elected to the high offices of state. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked. —Gore VidaI

You know, any time I want to get applause—and I lecture across America in state after state after state—when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: let us tax all the religions.” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don’t like their tax exemption.

A genius with the IQ of a moron. GORE VIDAL, ON ANDY WARHOL