Bruce Sterling > Quotes

“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll 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. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”
― 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

“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

“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, Burning Chrome

“America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”
― Bruce Sterling, 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, Schismatrix

“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, The Parthenopean Scalpel

“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, Distraction

“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

“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, Shaping Things

“You give a guy a license to
steal, you've got to expect him to use it.”
― Bruce Sterling

“I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“Google and Facebook don’t have “users” or “customers”. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»”
― Bruce Sterling, Different Kinds of Magic

“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, Distraction

“BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct, Nature, November 11, 1999:

Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese) -- 'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED.”
― Bruce Sterling

“This is not to say that science itself is politics. Scientific knowledge is profoundly different from political ideology. Science is an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involves falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible results, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge isn't a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table is a political construct.

But the things people do with science are every bit as political as the things people do with gold.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“...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, Distraction

“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.”
― Bruce Sterling

“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

“«“Looks like your sci-fi prediction came true right away, Xavier.”
“That can be gratifying,” mused the novelist. “But not all the time.”»”
― Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange

“«Once, I went to this little meeting of Microsoft kids. Like, this high-school trip thing, but it was very exclusive. We met the world’s greatest Futurist there. Dr Gustav Y. Svante. Nobody knows who he is. That’s why he’s the world’s greatest Futurist. He told us... He said that the future was already here, but nobody listens to the future. The future is all around us, but we don’t see the future yet. We don’t hear it or see it, so we can’t tell it.”»”
― Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange

“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

“Reality’s a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams.…”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus

“Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google’s actual, profitable, monetisable product. “Search” is merely Google’s front end, a brilliant facade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google’s “customers” or even Google’s “users”, but its feudal livestock.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»”
― Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange

“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, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“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, Schismatrix Plus

“Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well.”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus

“I'm Level Eighty on Warcraft."
The clerk was stunned. "You're Level Eighty?! Are you Horde, or Alliance?"
"What, are you kidding me? I'm Horde, of course! I'm a Level Eighty Undead Priestess. What Guild are you in?"
"I'm a Horde Blood Elf Paladin. Level 30. I'm in the Blood Roses Guild."
"Have you ever seen a 'Spectral Tiger' loot card? I bet you never have."
The museum clerk thought about her situation. The psychic pressure was mounting on her. She was in a state of moral anguish. "Look, Signora, I'd love to help your American clients there... But if my director knew I was Warcrafting here at work, she'd kill me! Besides, you don't have any 'Spectral Tiger' in your purse, I bet.”
― Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange