William S. Burroughs Quotes - Page 2

To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

as soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire

You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

How long does it take man to realize that he cannot want what he wants? You have to live in hell to see heaven.

The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time... and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility.

I'm definitely antiscientist because I feel that science represents a conspiracy to impose as the real and only universe, the universe of scientists themselves - they're reality-addicts, they've got to have things so real so they can get their hands on it.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.