"I say, they don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs."

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.”

“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.”

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

“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

"In fact, as I said before, North Korea is a far-right ultra-nationalist state and therefore its personality cult is very different from the personality cult that you had in the Soviet Union or in Chin…"

— Brian Reynolds Myers

Education1963

#mind

"A moment's reflection will show that India's case is not at par with the ones we have been considering. For those instances are of the most recent times - those nations were "imagined", those traditio…"

— Arun Shourie

Politics1941

#time

"The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the i…"

— Yasser Arafat

Politics1929–2004

#freedom

"Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the g…"

— Antonin Scalia

Law1936–2016

#war