Gore Vidal Quotes
Commercialism is doing well that which should not be done at all.
Vidal, Gore. Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973-1976. Random House, 1977, p. 10.
He was discussing the CFIUS process where foreign firms and government could secretly obtain permission to purchase American assets including key infrastructures.
It is interesting to compare this quotations to one from John Adams {44514} a century earlier or the commonly held view of many critics a century later. Perhaps these “new trends” are not so new after all.
Roosevelt believed that the person who just made money was sorely lacking and he had a duty to the society and the country that went beyond money. Much of the upper class though him a prig and resented his criticism.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, patrician manner, and polished style of writing. Vidal was openly bisexual and his novels often dealt with LGBT characters, which was unusual at the time. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California).
