For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the concept of freedom of speech, suggesting that it often leads to conformity rather than genuine expression.
Gore Vidal's statement reflects a cynical view of freedom of speech, implying that many people use it not to express original thoughts or ideas, but rather to echo the opinions and sentiments that are widely accepted in society. This observation serves as a commentary on the societal pressures that can stifle individuality and critical thinking, suggesting that true freedom of expression is rare and often overshadowed by the desire to fit in.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about censorship and the value of independent thought.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Envy is the central fact of American life.
For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.
Poverty is bitter, but it has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.
In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
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