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"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business con."
"The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."
"It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact."
"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
"Electing a bigot enables further bigotry."
"Civilization is the commercialization of survival."
Explore more quotes by William S. Burroughs
"To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don't know we know."
"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."
"Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! À bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."
"Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning."
"Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear."
"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."
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