Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

"Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means"

William S. Burroughs, Writer

About this Quote

Burroughs is doing what he always does: taking the supposedly hard, modern authority of chemistry and turning it into a joke on the reader. The line sounds like a technical truism, but it’s really a provocation aimed at mid-century faith in pharmaceuticals, psychiatry, and every tidy promise that a molecule can solve a life. If chemicals can do it, he implies, then the “it” was never sacred in the first place. Pleasure, calm, obedience, revelation, even love or “meaning” start to look less like inner truths and more like adjustable settings.

The subtext is both liberating and bleak. Liberating because it refuses the priesthood of the lab: no experience gets to claim special legitimacy just because it arrives in a syringe or a pill bottle. Bleak because it collapses the hierarchy in the other direction, too. If chemistry is merely one route to the same endpoints, then the mind is a system you can hack by any number of technologies: ritual, sex, deprivation, hypnosis, propaganda, surveillance, language. Burroughs, the writer who treated words as a virus and narrative as a control mechanism, is widening “chemical” into a metaphor for all engineered states.

Context matters: Burroughs wrote out of addiction, withdrawal, and a lifelong suspicion of institutions that brand control as care. The sentence carries the weary authority of someone who’s tested the pharmacological shortcut and noticed the larger machinery behind it. It’s not anti-science so much as anti-mystification: chemistry isn’t magic, and neither are we.

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Topic	Witty One-Liners
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William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs (February 5, 1914 - August 2, 1997) was a Writer from USA.

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