This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
We are the United States of amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
Time |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
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 militarized 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.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.
Imagination | Important | Novels | Think |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
Love |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
Power |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
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.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
If we succeed in cleaning up the environment, we donÂ’t have enough money for war. But Americans are basically pro-war. WeÂ’re a violent people and we like it.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
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.
Evidence | Inconvenient | Love | Means | Will |
Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
The elimination of rent, interest, profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people. That is the demand.
Equality | Philosophy | Principles | Race |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I did think of marrying once, and I explained it on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ in 1968. It was right after those debates with Bill Buckley during the conventions. I told Cavett that I once planned to marry Joanne Woodward. ‘What went wrong?’ Cavett asked. I told him that Joanne met Paul Newman and I met Bill Buckley.
Love | Understand |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
People |
Who knows but life be that which men call death, and death what men call life?
Who so neglects learning in his youth loses the past and is dead to the future.
I often think of the beautiful Turin, where sweet must feel to live.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.