“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”
Benway
Naked Lunch (1959)
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William S. Burroughs 110
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, a… 1914–1997Related quotes

Source: The Culture of Cities (1938), Ch. 7, sct. 16

The Use of Life (1894), ch. IV: Recreation

Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 114

Speech to the Cambridge University Aeronautical Society, April 1925 in Trenchard, Man of Vision (1962) p. 519

Quote in a questionnaire, Max Ernst filled out in 1948, the U.S; as cited in Max Ernst: a Retrospective, ed. Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2005, p. 7
1936 - 1950

Silence is a Commons (1982)
Context: The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads — commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Source: Education as a Science, 1898, p. 288.

To Army War College Graduates, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 7 June 2008 http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/07JUN08_ArmyWarCollege_Commencement.html, CJCS.