Bruce Sterling quotes

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)
Tomorrow composts today.
Bruce Sterling
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
One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.
Bruce Sterling
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
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
There's no victory-condition for being human.
Bruce Sterling
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
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
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
Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music. (Bruce Sterling)
The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.
Bruce Sterling
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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)
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
Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity's bio-technologies.
Bruce Sterling
Where there's war, there's whores.
Bruce Sterling
When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.
Bruce Sterling