Top 90 Bruce Sterling Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.”

— Bruce Sterling

3. “Information wants to be free. Believe it.”

— Bruce Sterling

4. “Don’t become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.”

— Bruce Sterling

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

9. “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

10. “Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

12. “The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.”

— Bruce Sterling

13. “I’m an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.”

— Bruce Sterling

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “The future isn’t just unwritten, it’s unsearched.”

— Bruce Sterling

20. “Tomorrow composts today.”

— Bruce Sterling

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Everybody has a different Internet.”

— Bruce Sterling

27. “The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.”

— Bruce Sterling

28. “It’s a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.”

— Bruce Sterling

29. “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.”

— Bruce Sterling

30. “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

31. “SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book – spikey and odd. It isn’t very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years.”

— Bruce Sterling

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

38. “I’m convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, “Dammit, my life doesn’t have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?” Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.”

— Bruce Sterling

39. “The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

41. “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.”

— Bruce Sterling

42. “Mankind’s a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.”

— Bruce Sterling

43. “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

44. “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

45. “They took my womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure center, darling. I’m wired to the ass and the spine and the throat, and it’s better than being God. When I’m hot, I sweat perfume. I’m cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing leaves my body that you can’t drink like wine or eat like candy. And they left me bright, so that I would know what submission was. Do you know what submission is, darling?”

— Bruce Sterling

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “There’s no victory-condition for being human.”

— Bruce Sterling