Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.
You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.
An addict never stops growing. Stupider.
I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness...
Humility is indeed beatness, a compulsory virtue that no one exhibits unless he has to.
Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.
The nonconformist here may be “beat down” by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.
Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. “I don’t have any whiskey,” may be a fact but it is not a truth.
You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you.
I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.
I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addiction. I did absolutely nothing.
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.
You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.