Top 90 Bruce Sterling Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.”

— Bruce Sterling

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Tomorrow composts today.”

— Bruce Sterling

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

70. “Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in Medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

72. “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

73. “Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn’t enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube.”

— Bruce Sterling

74. “It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song.”

— Bruce Sterling

75. “What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today’s mediated frenzy.”

— Bruce Sterling

76. “Without bacteria, the soil was a lifeless heap of imported lunar dust. With them, it was a constant mutational hazard.”

— Bruce Sterling

77. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

79. “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

80. “Take away America’s money, and you’ve got a country of tribes.”

— Bruce Sterling

81. “The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.”

— Bruce Sterling

82. “The reader is not a “customer” of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook’s genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the “Big Five” of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.”

— Bruce Sterling

83. “A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend.”

— Bruce Sterling

84. “I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird.”

— Bruce Sterling

85. “Microsoft, for its part, will cheerfully run the search engine Bing at a loss, for the sake of hampering Google’s freedom of action.”

— Bruce Sterling

86. “Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.”

— Bruce Sterling

87. “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

88. “The Internet of Things makes no attempt to redress, or even address, the many real problems that the internet brought to the world. On the contrary, it’s an international effort to bring everything that wasn’t internet within the purview of the techno-elite that currently dominates the internet.”

— Bruce Sterling

89. “I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it’s pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.”

— Bruce Sterling

90. “Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.”

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

92. “Political people don’t solve stuff – not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.”

— Bruce Sterling

93. “Maybe people don’t prize possessions now like they did in the premillenium. How could they? All their money goes into the Net. For games, or business, or television – things that come over the wires.”

— Bruce Sterling

94. “In fact, Jane kind of hoped that the twentieth-century heiress had really enjoyed herself as she thoughtlessly squandered the planet’s resources and lived like a fattened barnyard animal.”

— Bruce Sterling