171 Quotes by Bruce Sterling

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death."

"Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it’s on fire."

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

"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."