Bruce Sterling famous quotes

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

#Wise #Play #Ideas

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

#Suicide #Class #People

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

#War #Land #Hats

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

#Eye #Thinking #Going Away

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

#Mean #Way #Imagine

The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Ignorance #Data #Levels

Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ***** at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Silly #Vegas #Gambling

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

#Fire #Worry #Gorillas

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
-- Bruce Sterling

#People #Belief #Smooth

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

#Clouds #September 11 #Age

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

#Ideas #Environmental #Rotting

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

#War #Clouds #Mushrooms

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

#Distance #Writing #Intellectual

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

#Dope #Government #Long

You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be the geek they will never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them, they put you here. You should realize what society has made of you and take full revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly thoroughly weird and don’t do it half way, put every ounce of your horse power into it. Have the artistic courage to realize your significance in culture.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Horse #Revenge #People

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

#Bollywood #Dallas #Pay

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

#Thinking #Needs #Trends

One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Madness #Distraction

(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

#Men #Finals #Purpose

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

#Morning #Shining #Atoms

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Children #Fun #Real

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

#World #Littles #Dignity

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

#Fall #Tyrants #Noble

Your attitude determines your altitude. Your ambitions are bigger than life Of course. They must be. They encompass it.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Attitude #Ambition #Bigger

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

#D Day #Literature #Berlin

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

#Reign #Saws #Corny

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. Thats how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Today #Students #T Shirt

The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Ruins #Century #21st Century

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

#Real #People #Imagination

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

#Technology #Thinking #Years

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Accountability #Four #Honest

The future isn't just unwritten, it's unsearched.
-- Bruce Sterling

In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident .
-- Bruce Sterling

#Party #Fall #Innocent

Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Stupid #Profound #Computer

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Clouds #Development #Silver

Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Mirrors #Cyberspace

As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Morning #Philosophical #Loss

There's no victory-condition for being human.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Victory #Being Human #Humans

It's going to be really interesting to see what the ***** 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

#Two #Dubai #Years

Tomorrow composts today.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Today #Tomorrow #Compost

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

#Military #Hands #Next

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

#Writing #Data #Names

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

#Movie #Shoes #Bollywood

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

#Peace #War #World

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

#Military #World #Politics

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

#Success #Jobs #People

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

#Dream #Technology #Twists

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

#Song #Writing #Cynical

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Mean #Thinking #Media

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Writing #Research #Nonfiction

I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.
-- Bruce Sterling

#Military #Entertainment #Entertainers

Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.
-- Bruce Sterling

#People #Guy #Political

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

#Trends #Security #Universe

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

#Ignorance #Home #Privacy