I'm all for bringing back the birch. But only between consenting adults. -- Gore Vidal, in an interview on The Frost Programme, 1966 Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. -- Gore Vidal, in: Sunday Times Magazine, 16 September 1973 A triumph of the embalmer's art. -- Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan, in: The Observer, 26 April 1981 Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin. -- Gore Vidal, in: The Observer, 7 February 1982 It's a country evenly divided between conservatives and reactionaries. -- Gore Vidal on the United States, in: The Observer, 16 September 1984 Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. -- Gore Vidal, in: Emmy, May 1991 In almost every case [where the United States has fought wars] our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people. -- Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) 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. -- Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) 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. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress. -- Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) He is the most Swiftian writer we have in his savage pessimism about the human condition, his unresolved paradoxes, his hatred of hypocrisy, corruption, and the kind of patriotism which means nothing more than "persuading a man to kill a man he doesn't know." -- Victoria Glendinning on Gore Vidal, 1999

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