Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t flatter language as civilization’s great achievement; he treats it like an infection. “Language is a virus from outer space” is sci-fi phrasing deployed as cultural sabotage: a pulpy metaphor that smuggles in a bleak theory of how power works. A virus hijacks its host’s machinery to reproduce itself. In Burroughs’s view, words do something similar: they colonize the brain, run on repetition, and compel behavior while pretending to be neutral tools we wield.

The “outer space” tag matters. It casts language as alien, not innate, which undercuts the comforting liberal story that speech equals freedom. If language is external and invasive, then the self is porous, “choice” is suspect, and politics becomes a struggle over whose linguistic code gets to replicate. Burroughs wrote this in a Cold War media environment saturated with advertising, propaganda, and psychiatric/penal bureaucracies - systems that don’t just describe reality but administer it. His cut-up experiments weren’t quirky avant-garde games; they were a countermeasure, a way to scramble the signal, interrupt the script, and expose the mechanical loops inside “common sense.”

There’s also a comic nastiness to the line. Burroughs knows the thrill of the outrageous diagnosis: not “language can deceive,” but “language is the deceiver.” The subtext is both paranoid and practical. If words are contagious, you stop treating them as transparent and start treating them as vectors - monitoring what you repeat, what repeats you, and which phrases are quietly living off your attention.