Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs isn’t offering a protest slogan so much as a demolition manual for the mind. “Control images” sounds abstract until you remember his lifelong obsession: power doesn’t just police bodies; it scripts perception. Images are the hooks - advertising, broadcast news, respectability itself - the repeating frames that tell you what desire looks like, what fear should attach to, who counts as human. The line is blunt because the target is slippery: control works best when it feels like common sense.

The genius of the phrasing is its double insistence. “Smash” is physical, almost gleefully crude, a refusal of polite critique. Burroughs distrusts reform language because it tends to be absorbed by the very system it criticizes. If you can be “included,” you can be managed. So he reaches for sabotage, not persuasion. And he pairs the psychological with the infrastructural: “images” and “machine.” One is content, the other is delivery. Break one without the other and the program reboots.

Context matters: postwar America’s booming media apparatus, the Cold War’s paranoia, the criminalization of drugs and queer life, the rise of corporate spectacle. Burroughs saw control as viral - a self-replicating code - and his own cut-up experiments were an artistic countermeasure, scrambling narrative the way you’d scramble a signal. The subtext is cynical but energizing: freedom isn’t a belief; it’s a practice of interruption. If you don’t disrupt the images, the machine keeps dreaming for you.