Daily Inspiration Quote by Gore Vidal

There is a sly double exposure in Vidal's line: it reads like a toast to modernity and an indictment of it, delivered in the same dry breath. "All in all" is the tell. It’s the phrase you use when the evidence has been mixed, when you’ve tallied the wreckage and the champagne and decided the ledger still comes out positive. Vidal, who made a career out of puncturing American self-mythology, slips a shrug into what could have been a triumphalist sentence. He isn’t praising the century so much as claiming it as a spectacle he couldn’t resist.

The subtext is voyeuristic and faintly prosecutorial. "Would not have missed" suggests he’s not exactly grateful; he’s intrigued. The 20th century gave Vidal his favorite materials: empire dressed up as democracy, mass media as a new religion, politics as entertainment, and sex and scandal as tools for telling the truth that polite society pretends not to know. To say he wouldn’t miss it "for the world" plays as a pun with teeth: the world is both the audience and the stake. This century made "the world" smaller through war, technology, and American reach, then asked everyone to pretend that shrinking felt like progress.

Context matters because Vidal is an insider-outsider: born into privilege, fluent in power, contemptuous of its alibis. The line lands as a final, elegantly acid verdict from someone who watched the American century up close and found it appalling, fascinating, and irresistibly narratable.