Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs aims his knife at the kind of confidence game he knew from the inside: the street hustle, the drug economy, the sleek American sales pitch that insists everything and everyone can be worked. “Hustlers of the world” riffs on Marx’s rallying cry, but he swaps class solidarity for predator solidarity, calling out an international brotherhood of operators. The twist is that he’s not condemning them from a safe moral perch; he’s speaking in their language, acknowledging the craft. That’s what gives the line its sting. It doesn’t preach. It warns.

“The mark” is con jargon for the sucker, the person you can separate from their money, their time, their body. Burroughs’ move is to relocate that sucker to the interior. The unbeatable victim is the self: appetite, fantasy, compulsion, denial. You can outsmart other people, outrun cops, lie cleanly, reinvent your story. But you can’t con your own nervous system for long. The “inside” is where the real leverage lives, and it’s brutal because it’s intimate.

Context matters: Burroughs wrote through the mid-century American underside - heroin, queer secrecy, paranoia, surveillance, the sense that “control” is the governing technology of modern life. His work treats addiction less as a personal failing than as a system that scripts desire and calls it freedom. This line compresses that worldview into a streetwise koan: every hustler is also being hustled, and the house always has one unbeatable edge - your own mind.