Not what you think.

Fortean Times is the go-to site on the Internet for all your Gore Vidal quotation needs, as all the literati know (particularly since the New Yorker went all Kato Kaelin/Beyonce/Roseanne Barr), and the On This Day entry for today is perhaps the finest example thereof.

6 September. The Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth on this day in 1620. Gore Vidal one remarked that they left England ‘not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs, but because they were forbidden to persecute others for their beliefs.’

Well that would explain a great deal.