William S. Burroughs Men Quotations

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

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

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my good big centipede! If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

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.

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

I think Judge Learned Hand was a cultured, intelligent man.

Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.

Man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand.

If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

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

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...

In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.