William S. Burroughs Quotes

There can never be surprises in logic.

People are incredible creatures of habit.

There is no suspense in inevitability.

The National Academy of Sciences would be unable to give a unanimous decision if asked whether the sun would rise tomorrow.

Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

Events are not a matter of chance.

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.

We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

The doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual's mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred: that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event.

. . . She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.

What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.

Science rejects the indeterminate.

Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science.

Every choice you make has a consequence, every one. It's mathematic. It cannot fail; it never fails.

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

No one will ever make necessity not happen.

Everything necessarily is or is not, and will be or will not be; but one cannot divide and say that one or the other is necessary.I mean, for example: it is necessary for there to be or not to be a sea-battle tomorrow; but it is not necessary for a sea-battle to take place tomorrow, or for one not to take place--though it is necessary for one to take place or not to take place.

I know with certainty, that [an honest man] is not to put his hand into the fire, and hold it there, till it be consumed: And thisevent, I think I can foretell with the same assurance, as that, if he throw himself out at the window, and meet with no obstruction, he will not remain a moment suspended in the air.

Whatever behavior you've experienced from people in the past, expect them to do it again and again and again.

As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.