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The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer.

— William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959)

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Democracy

More quotes by William S. Burroughs

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Naked Lunch (1959)

A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.

Friends magazine (1970)

Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets.

Naked Lunch (1959)

If the right to mind one's own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.

The Place Of Dead Roads‎ (1983)

A functioning police state needs no police.

Naked Lunch (1959)

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William S. Burroughs (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.