841 Quotes by Gore Vidal

If you’re not part of that club, as I certainly am not, you are not presidential.

But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man’s life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.

Come to me and show me a small cancer and I’ll tell you you’ve got a small cancer that should be cut out. That’s realism but in America it’s called cynicism.

As Seward did not understand the reference, he did not ask for an explanation. In any case, he had a constitutional dislike of being told things that he did not know, as opposed to ferreting them out.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelet,” said Butler sententiously.

You can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

Soon he would move on.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that’s just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.