117 quotes
ELLEN: Conrad’s a pacifist and willing to fight for it.
Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
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)
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
What I've Learned (2008)
We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.
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)
Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
The Second American Revolution (1983)
Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life.
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.
The Second American Revolution (1983)
We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.
What I've Learned (2008)
...American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?
United States - Essays 1952–1992 (1992)
'Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon.
We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act.
And though I rather suspect that in a century’s time the novel will be as rare and private an art form as poetry today or that delicate and laborious process by which dedicated men fire glass with color, it will always be worth the doing.
Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
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.
Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973–1976 (1978)
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.
A View from the Diner's Club (1991)
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return ...
Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973–1976 (1978)
KRETON: But I love having you bore me. You do it so beautifully.
Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
Gore Vidal's America (2009)
You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque.
Gore Vidal's America (2009)
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)