Top 90 Bruce Sterling Quotes (2026 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 isn’t just unwritten, it’s unsearched.”

— Bruce Sterling

6. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Everybody has a different Internet.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

19. “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.”

— Bruce Sterling

20. “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

21. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Bruce Sterling

34. “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

35. “Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it.”

— Bruce Sterling

36. “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

37. “You could tell that the plant life here wasn’t at all used to the kindness of rain. The plants weren’t a bit better than humanity, really – just another ugly, nasty, acquisitive species, born to suffer, and expecting little.”

— Bruce Sterling

38. “Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well.”

— Bruce Sterling

39. “We had a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blew them all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid and shortsighted, and we threw all our chances away.”

— Bruce Sterling

40. “People will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities than they will fight to defend their own individual selves.”

— Bruce Sterling

41. “He was a thing of flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will. A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That was what death was for.”

— Bruce Sterling

42. “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

43. “Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can’t be tolerated.”

— Bruce Sterling

44. “Emmanuel Goldstein,” editor and publisher of a print magazine known as 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.”

— Bruce Sterling

45. “We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs. Because.”

— Bruce Sterling

46. “Jane hoped that it had all turned out okay for the woman in the end, and that she’d been nice and dead and buried before she realized what her way of life had done to her planet.”

— Bruce Sterling

47. “We’ll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever.”

— Bruce Sterling

48. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

50. “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