Gore Vidal Quotes

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

I’m a born – again atheist.

I have been saying for the some time now that America has only one party – the property party. It’s the party of big corporation, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn’t be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.

For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself . . . one’s friends must fail.

Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society…. To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.

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

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

God, or what have you, will not be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased or conceived.