Gore Vidal Quotes

The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.

Subordinate classes have usually pushed for democracy, dominant classes nearly always have resisted it.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

One of the most constant laws of history is … immediately [if] any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others.

If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

Should the old system remain, then I swear before God to you that within a few years we shall see a Stadholder back again for I know of no other counter-weight to the formidable spirit of Aristocracy …

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges.

Because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government - democracy and oligarchy.

Every class is unfit to govern.

The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.

Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society.

The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule.

Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?

Some is more equal than others, as is well known. It ain't that your majority is outnumbered, you're just out-surrounded.

The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government.

The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.