Gore Vidal Quotes

Those people who shun us just because of the label we're on, or the fact that we've got a video out there that's getting us somewhere, are only limiting themselves, because they aren't keeping an open mind.

Everyone has these ideas, especially about the middle of the country, about people being backwards and three-toothed.

… cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

New York is just as provincial as anyone else.

Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic - those are sort of three layers of repression.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

It liberates the vandal to travel-you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.

American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

Prejudice is ignorance.

And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

Nothing gives small minds a better handle for hatred than superiority.

I could not understand how people could not like something as beautiful as the aerodrome. But I had lately become convinced that in general people were pretty boring. They liked to moan for hours on end about how hard it was to make ends meet, about the money they owed, the price of food, and other similar worries, but the minute some more brilliant or attractive subject come up, they were struck deaf.

It's a lot of anti-gay, racist humor—which people like in America—all couched in 'I'm telling it like it is.' He's in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I'm-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel-selling-ring-tones act. That's where we are as a nation now. We're in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance.

Bigotry is the sacred disease, and self-conceit tells lies.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.