William S. Burroughs Quotes

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

Faith is the lack of evidence, and it shouldn't be that difficult to convince people that the right reason to believe something is that there is evidence for it. People do not innately go for this view, but nevertheless it is not that difficult to teach.

Never act upon wishful thinking. Act without checking the facts, and chances are that you will be swept away along with the mob.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

I think the mistake that people make often times is you just lose touch of reality and you have to never be afraid to call someone's bullshit or call someone's bluff when something doesn't make sense.

Faith means the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. It’s nothing to be admired.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

To think truly is noble and to be deceived is base.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

The Yesees said yes to anything That anyone suggested. The Noees said no to everything Unless it was proven and tested. So the Yesees all died of much too much And the Noees all died of fright, But somehow I think the Thinkforyourselfees All came out all right.

This then is the age of reason.

I had begun to read books and things and, in fact, one of the persons who started me thinking seriously was an atheist that I, another negro inmate whom I'd heard in a discussion with white inmates and who was able to hold his own at all levels. And he impressed me with his knowledge, and I began to listen very carefully to some of the things he said.

I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.