Top 100 Bruce Sterling Quotes
#1. Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation.
Bruce Sterling
#2. I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. That's how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.
Bruce Sterling
#3. Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act.
Bruce Sterling
#4. In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?
Bruce Sterling
#5. We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That's what government is for.
Bruce Sterling
#6. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.
Bruce Sterling
#8. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original.
Bruce Sterling
#9. My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to Senator One.
Bruce Sterling
#10. Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life.
Bruce Sterling
#11. You give a guy a license to
steal, you've got to expect him to use it.
Bruce Sterling
#12. But from another, deeper perspective: we shouldn't involve outselves in lines of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead people. There's no appeal in that. It's bad for us. That kind of inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human.
Bruce Sterling
#13. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce Sterling
#14. It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.
Bruce Sterling
#15. We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'
We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.
Bruce Sterling
#17. Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.
Bruce Sterling
#18. We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that '9/11'? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.
Bruce Sterling
#19. To run the world, you had to find it in yourself to grit your teeth and just fake it. Just stare them down, never back off.
Bruce Sterling
#20. My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?
Bruce Sterling
#21. Alex direly wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about try anything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he won their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative and leeway. Then he'd try something stupid.
Bruce Sterling
#22. Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it.
Bruce Sterling
#23. David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.
Bruce Sterling
#24. I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.
Bruce Sterling
#25. Getting what you want is a serious matter. It is far more transformative than frustration.
Bruce Sterling
#26. (He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute
Bruce Sterling
#27. I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird.
Bruce Sterling
#28. I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.
Bruce Sterling
#29. Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.
Bruce Sterling
#30. War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.
Bruce Sterling
#31. If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.
Bruce Sterling
#32. I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like a teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals, for Christ's sake, and she's just a prole.
Bruce Sterling
#33. He was a thing of flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will. A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That was what death was for.
Bruce Sterling
#35. The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.
Bruce Sterling
#36. A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs
Bruce Sterling
#37. Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.
Bruce Sterling
#38. But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.
Bruce Sterling
#39. People in the Pentagon had colleagues killed and maimed by bin Laden. They're trying to find bin Laden and kill him and his cult. Naturally they consider that a legitimate thing to do, but they're having mixed success at the job.
Bruce Sterling
#41. Every Concatenate world faced biological problems as the habitat aged.
Bruce Sterling
#42. Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.
Bruce Sterling
#43. Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible.
Bruce Sterling
#44. For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, then he'd been for years.
Bruce Sterling
#45. I knew suddenly that I could not endure another week in Venice, not another day of their gentle melancholy, not another hour of fashionable despair.
Bruce Sterling
#46. Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.
Bruce Sterling
#47. But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.
Bruce Sterling
#48. One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.
Bruce Sterling
#49. You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.
Bruce Sterling
#50. Cloud computing seems to be following this evolutionary path: A - Internet backbone. B - Information Superhighway. C - The Net. D - The Web. E - The Cloud. F - "Ubiquity" G - ??? ...
Bruce Sterling
#52. In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident .
Bruce Sterling
#53. I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening.
Bruce Sterling
#54. The digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians.
Bruce Sterling
#55. We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.
Bruce Sterling
#56. Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube.
Bruce Sterling
#57. Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.
Bruce Sterling
#58. It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song.
Bruce Sterling
#59. Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it's built on literal sand.
Bruce Sterling
#60. I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away ... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
Bruce Sterling
#61. He spread his arms in benediction, like that Jesus statue in Brazil before the Maoists blew it up.
Bruce Sterling
#62. Okay, are you really 'experimenting'? How do you know if you're really experimenting? You're working on it methodically and you're publishing the results! It's not an experiment if you don't publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?
Bruce Sterling
#63. You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.
Bruce Sterling
#64. Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.
Bruce Sterling
#65. Politically, economically and socially, the Twenty-Teens are a Depression. The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.
Bruce Sterling
#66. We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame.
Bruce Sterling
#67. They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called 'war' too. And there will still be no conventional war.
Bruce Sterling
#68. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
Bruce Sterling
#69. The past is a kind of future that has already happened.
Bruce Sterling
#70. The Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses.
Bruce Sterling
#71. The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.
Bruce Sterling
#72. Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.
Bruce Sterling
#73. You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you.
Bruce Sterling
#74. I wouldn't describe that 'position' as 'parasitic.' I'd describe that experience as 'edifying.' I don't merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here.
Bruce Sterling
#75. I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
Bruce Sterling
#76. Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.
Bruce Sterling
#77. My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450.
Bruce Sterling
#78. Do you remember, Abelard ... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God."
"I remember."
"I was wrong, darling. Being God is better.
Bruce Sterling
#79. Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
Bruce Sterling
#80. Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.
Bruce Sterling
#81. A set of Bollywood actresses are coming through Dallas soon in a live tour; I'd pay a lot to see them, but alas, I'm fully booked elsewhere.
Bruce Sterling
#82. If you don't have a sense of wonder it's like you're dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that's basically a conjurer's trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.
Bruce Sterling
#83. A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend.
Bruce Sterling
#84. The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.
Bruce Sterling
#85. Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
Bruce Sterling
#86. Every passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.
Bruce Sterling
#87. Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook's oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren't commodities.
Bruce Sterling
#88. The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It's a new platform for radically broadening digital activity.
Bruce Sterling
#89. Your audience are whores, oxygen farmers, two dozen pirate bands, and fifty runaway mathematicians. They would all love to see dancing and fighting.
Bruce Sterling
#90. They can't strike against smugglers! We're not the government. We are a criminal private-enterprise operation!
Bruce Sterling
#91. One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.
Bruce Sterling
#92. Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?
Bruce Sterling
#93. "Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.
Bruce Sterling
#94. I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.
Bruce Sterling
#95. SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book - spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years.
Bruce Sterling
#96. I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.
Bruce Sterling
#97. If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.
Bruce Sterling
#98. When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
Bruce Sterling
#99. Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
Bruce Sterling
#100. It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
Bruce Sterling
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