Quotes by Bruce Sterling - Page 2

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 / Author
Apocalypse
Bombs
Class
Middle
Middle Class
People
Poor
Poor People
Rich
Suicide
Brink
Guys
Instead
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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 / Author
Government
Dope
Long
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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 / Author
Home
Ignorance
Literature
Privacy
Circumstance
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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 / Author
Distance
Intellectual
Writing
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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 / Author
Critical
Distance
Describe
Merely
Parasitic
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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 / Author
Corny
Reign
Saws
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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 / Author
Politics
Developing
Ecological
Massive
Military
World
Commonly
Developing World
Disasters
Fail
Repeated
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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 / Author
Fall
Noble
Tyrants
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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 / Author
Cynical
Forever
Pop Song
Song
Writing
Illusions
List
Solution
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"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 / Author
Design
Inquiry
Stories
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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 / Author
Legal
Data
Names
Sterling
Vote
Writing
Bruce
Identities
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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 / Author
Aircraft
Berlin
D Day
Hiroshima
Literature
Topics
Buildings
Slow
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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 / Author
Technology
Cyberspace
Fifty
Ten
Thinking
Years
Aware
Ten Years
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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 / Author
Cutting
Data
Evidence
Leaks
Pursued
Shadow
Starting Over
Chain
Cut
Forming
Thousands
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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 / Author
Movie
Bollywood
Distribution
Literature
Making Money
Shoes
Corrupt
Sell
Stepped
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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 / Author
Eye
Going Away
Thinking
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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 / Author
Jobs
Success
Colleagues
Cult
Pentagon
People
Naturally
Bin
Consider
Maimed
Mixed
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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 / Author
Dubai
Two
Years
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(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 / Author
Men
Finals
Purpose
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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 / Author
Morning
Atoms
Shining
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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 / Author
Form
Okay
Results
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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 / Author
Mean
Mutation
Painful
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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 / Author
Environmental
Amusement
Disaster
Ideas
Lively
Parks
Possibility
Rotting
Seems
Adventurers
Area
Barrier
Entire
Extremely
Gets
Park
Tour
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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 / Author
People
Perspective
Victory
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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 / Author
Guy
Ideas
Mean
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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 / Author
Committed
Genocide
Nuclear
Shooting
Urban
Weapons
Acts
Cloud
Washington
Disappeared
Event
Mushroom
Rogue
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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 / Author
War
Clouds
Mushrooms
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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 / Author
Dark
Latin
Past
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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 / Author
Wise
Ideas
Play
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The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
Bruce Sterling / Author
Kids
Cyberspace
Mirrors
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I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected.
Bruce Sterling / Author
Fun
Grandparent
Thinking
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University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.
Bruce Sterling / Author
Civilization
Data
Skulls
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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 / Author
Children
Fun
Real
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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 ass 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 / Author
Gambling
Silly
Vegas
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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 / Author
Morning
Loss
Philosophical
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I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.
Bruce Sterling / Author
Fire
Organization
Worry
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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 / Author
Horse
People
Revenge
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Bruce Sterling Quotes - Page 2

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