Bruce Sterling Quotes

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?!?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The future is a process, not a destination.

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.

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.

Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.

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.

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

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.

Tomorrow composts today.

Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.

Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.

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.

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?

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.

Information wants to be free. Believe it.

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

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

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

It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.

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

There's no victory-condition for being human.

Open-source is a means of production.

Find a client and get a job.

Every passing year brings us more past futures.

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.

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.

The past is a kind of future that has already happened.

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.

Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.

Information wants you to give me a dollar.

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- ???

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.

Everybody has a different Internet.

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

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

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.

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