True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know. Gore Vidal More Quotes by Gore Vidal More Quotes From Gore Vidal 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 objectivitymediacountry How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb. Gore Vidal cleveryearsthinking There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public. Gore Vidal maintainingstupiditypeople Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the Gore Vidal politicalgeniuspeople It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. Gore Vidal runningcountrythinking I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system. Gore Vidal educationalracepeople Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half. Gore Vidal populationhalfclever The unfed mind devours itself. Gore Vidal mind USA belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It's genius. It's like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through. Gore Vidal nbc-newsblockmen We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. Gore Vidal united-statespoliticsremember Reality is something the human race doesn't handle very well. Gore Vidal wellsracereality As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action. Gore Vidal election-timelanguageaction The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did. Gore Vidal mothercountryamerica At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice. Gore Vidal public-opinionsuperstitionsprejudice 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 classcountrypeople I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe. Gore Vidal europeaveragecountry Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government) Gore Vidal libertarianlibertygovernment Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. Gore Vidal votingpoliticalpeople Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses." Gore Vidal partywingstwo We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself. Gore Vidal artistkingsboys
