Gore Vidal Quotes

All great reforms go together.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.

Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.

All past history with the exception of the primitive stages was the history of class struggles.

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society.

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

Most governments and people want reform. It’s the prospect of change that makes reform rare.

The period of radical reform is finished.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

I am a correctionist. If something is wrong in society, it must be fixed. At least one should try to fix it.

The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided; the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed.

We need a revival in the country,” Paul said. “We need another Great Awakening with tent revivals of thousands of people saying, 'reform or see what's going to happen if we don't reform.'

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

The truth is we have a political system and an economic system controlled by a few extremely wealthy people. Not Barack Obama, not Bernie Sanders, no one person has the influence by himself or herself to take on this enormous array of power unless millions of people begin to work together to demand changes.

Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.

We will never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

There is no alternative to class struggle.

I'm just seeing as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, that a lot of things I see from a race perspective are class problems too, so I should be advocating for all.

Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.