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Any imposition of government censorship on the media is a step in the direction of State control, a step which big money is most reluctant to take.

— William S. Burroughs The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)

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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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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

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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.