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"Abandon all nations, the planet drifts to random insect doom."
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"A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time."

"Why we don't feel sorry for killing thousands of mosquitoes every day? Are they useless or too many? We humans must realize it before it is too late."

"Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside."

"The mother-earth may not like the way we preserve her...if any."

"The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing."

"Clean communities, crystal clear coastal waters."

"Denial of climate change and degradation of environment for the purpose of economic prosperity is humiliation and slavery of the nature."

"I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history."

"It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill."

"American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use."
Explore more quotes by William S. Burroughs

"Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life."

"The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets."

"What's with the serum?"I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..."Or a joke."Precisely. Arty type...No principles..."

"A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering."

"You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence."

"Two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws."

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