Skip to content

Quotes from Julian — Gore Vidal

1925–2012 United States

← All quotes by Gore Vidal

25 quotes

...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another.

Julian (1964)

His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.

Julian (1964)

One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.

Julian (1964)

We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers.

Julian (1964)

Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.

Julian (1964)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Gore Vidal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.