Gore Vidal

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was an American writer, novelist, and intellectual. He wrote witty commentaries on American social norms and politics, and twice sought elected office as a Democrat.


[Andy Warhol] is the only genius with an IQ of 85.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action….

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the things satirized; if they are not, the joke falls flat.

In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull.

The period of Prohibition--called the noble experiment--brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here.

The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

We are all so simple at heart that become unfathomable to one another.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.