Gore Vidal on ... the world

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

July 31, 2012 10:02 PM PT

Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday at 86, knew how to demolish intellectual rivals like Norman Mailer andWilliam F. Buckley Jr. with acidic one-liners, establishing himself as a peerless master of talk-show punditry. Here’s a look at some of his comments over the years. Read his full obituary | Photos: Gore Vidal’s life and career

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.” (Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times)

“Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual. There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said, ‘Oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.’” (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“From 1950,” Vidal told the National Press Club in a speech, there has been “strict governmental control of our economy and the gradual erosion of our liberties, all in order to benefit the economic interest of what is never, to put it tactfully, a very large group.” (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Vidal on the George W. Bush administration

Vidal says it is “eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes” and charges that its response to Sept. 11 delivered “the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties by phone-tapping, unlawful deportation of suspects and powers to arrest and detain individuals.” (Wyatt Counts / Associated Press)