Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs takes a familiar complaint about busybodies and turns it into a pathogen model of social harm. The line is built like a sneer with a microscope: people who meddle are not merely annoying, they are structurally parasitic, animated by absence. “No business of their own to mind” isn’t just an insult about idleness; it frames interference as a survival strategy for the spiritually unemployed. The kicker - “any more than a smallpox virus has” - yanks the reader from moral critique into biology. Viruses don’t create, don’t cultivate, don’t even properly live; they replicate by hijacking hosts. Burroughs is saying the worst human intrusions operate the same way: they colonize attention, institutions, and bodies to reproduce themselves.

That metaphor lands because it refuses the comforting idea that social trouble comes from grand villains with coherent motives. In Burroughs’ worldview, catastrophe often comes from systems and compulsions that propagate because they can, not because they “believe” in anything. That’s a hallmark of his broader work: addiction, control, surveillance, moral panic - forces that spread through contact, not persuasion.

There’s also a cold jab at reformist righteousness. The busybody doesn’t need a cause; the cause needs a busybody. By linking meddling to smallpox, Burroughs implies that some forms of “concern” are less civic virtue than contagion: a transmission vector for control disguised as care.