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If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

William S. Burroughs

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William S. Burroughs
Age: 83 †
Born: 1914
Born: February 5
Died: 1997
Died: August 11
Essayist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
William Seward Burroughs II
Uilʹi︠a︡m Berrouz
William Lee
William Burroughs
Ouiliam Baroouz
William Seward Burroughs
Willy Lee
William S. (William Seward) Burroughs
Must
Realizing
Ruthless
Courses
Mortality
Course
Chances
High
Survival
Chance
Rate
Mother
Realize
Nature
Second
Seems
Teacher

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

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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.
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Modern man has lost the option of silence.
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In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.
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Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.
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So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.
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Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
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The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: A foot stamping on a human face forever! This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
William S. Burroughs
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As soon as you have a problem, it's insoluble. These things should never have been allowed to happen.
William S. Burroughs
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In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.
William S. Burroughs
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The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs
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I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go.
William S. Burroughs
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What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.
William S. Burroughs
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I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.
William S. Burroughs
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Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. I don't have any whiskey, may be a fact but it is not a truth.
William S. Burroughs
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The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms - this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color.
William S. Burroughs
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All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war.
William S. Burroughs
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Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.
William S. Burroughs
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If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.
William S. Burroughs
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Now all politicians assume a necessity of control, the more efficient the control the better.
William S. Burroughs
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NOTHING happens by coincidence.
William S. Burroughs