Skip to content

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Another quote →

Topics

History

More quotes by Gore Vidal

Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?

Julian (1964)

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972)

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

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.

Julian (1964)

All Gore Vidal quotes →

You may also like

A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gore Vidal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.