William S. Burroughs Quotes

Listen," he said. "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?" No, but--" You're goddam right they don't

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.

I do what I've got to do to survive, to keep my teeth in my head, and my head on my shoulders. I apologize to whoever can't put that together and understand that.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

The one in front of the gun lives forever

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

They hadn’t counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to pass on its genetic code, to thrive in a new form. They hadn’t anticipated its will to live.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

Some trees flourish, others die. Some cattle grow strong, others are taken by wolves. Some men are born rich enough and dumb enough to enjoy their lives. Ain't nothing fair. You know that.

There's just a law to the universe. We can have the San Andreas rip tonight. You've nothing to do with that. We could have had that super hurricane, that, look what it did to South Carolina two or three hundred miles offshore! Imagine if a category 5 eye wall went right up the Chesapeake Bay. They can say "well, mankind did that." No, mother nature decides. So, will we survive? I'm sure we will.

Moths like me die by the thousands every minute. Her work goes on all the same. Glory unto Mother!

The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever

Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation - they are the normal endings of the stately creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness.

Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them.

Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.

At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly

The earth continues to go round, whether it's the man who kills the tiger or the tiger who eats the man. The stronger asserts his will, it's the law of nature. The world doesn't change; its laws are eternal.

This is the law of the Yukon, that only the strong shall thrive; that surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive.

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).

Mother Nature is a pretty good bioterrorist.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.