Top 90 Bruce Sterling Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

54. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

56. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

63. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

88. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling

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

— Bruce Sterling

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Bruce Sterling