Politics & Power Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s line lands like a cocktail-party jab that’s been sharpened into a social diagnosis: money doesn’t just buy comfort in America, it buys personality erosion. The insult is structural. “Accumulates” isn’t “earns” or “wins”; it suggests hoarding, an identity built around acquisition rather than appetite, curiosity, risk. By the time you’re accumulating, you’re no longer living toward something - you’re curating security, and security is the great enemy of surprise.

The real bite is in “less interesting,” a word that pretends to be aesthetic while delivering a moral verdict. Vidal isn’t wagging a sermon about greed; he’s mocking a culture where wealth becomes a substitute for interior life. The subtext is that affluence creates a closed loop: the richer you get, the more your social world narrows into people and institutions designed to protect that richness. You learn the etiquette of not offending clients, donors, voters, boards. You stop having opinions that cost anything. You stop telling stories that don’t flatter you.

Context matters: Vidal spent his career skewering American pieties - sex, class, empire, and the national myth that money equals merit. As a novelist and public intellectual, he watched celebrity, politics, and “respectability” merge into a single marketplace. The line works because it frames wealth not as power but as a diminishing return on humanity: an economy where the price of having more is being less.