"We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive as are thee great; particularly philosophers."

Gore Vidal Literature See all quotes by Gore Vidal →

React to this quote

More by Gore Vidal

“Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad enough as it is. It cannot educate or medicate or feed the people; it cannot do anything but kill the people. No State like that do we want prying into our private lives.”

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

“On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact.”

“His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself.”

“In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue.”

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.”

Resonant Thoughts

"When I was 25, all I did was just scream, "Sellout! Fucking sellouts. Corporate sellout. Industry bullshit. Meh-meh-meh." I look back on it and I realized, "oh, I was screaming 'sellout' because nobod…"

— Patton Oswalt

Entertainment1969

#justice

"From far away, through the sights of a sniper, they would look like Muslims, Serbs or Croats to somebody, but I approached them face to face, I saw them clearly, and trust me... They were just people.…"

— Đorđe Balašević

Music1953–2021

#justice

"Unlike the La Pérouse expedition the Conquistadors sought not knowledge but Gold. They used their superior weapons to loot and murder, in their madness they obliterated a civilisation. In the name of …"

— Carl Sagan

Science1934–1996

#knowledge

"More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it’s too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees li…"

— Ray Bradbury

Literature1920–2012

#mind