Quotes from Bruce Sterling

They can't strike against smugglers! We're not the government. We are a criminal private-enterprise operation!

but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet…. It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.

The digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians.

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

Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can't be tolerated.

Someone that I used to be truly loved someone you used to be once. Try not to forget me.

For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, then he'd been for years.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

One of the great beauties of politics as an art form was its lack of restriction to merely standard forms of realism.

You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you.

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.

truly elegant design that people always use when they make things to kill each other.

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

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.

I put the mud on the wheel, I spun it, and I could work clay. It was a miracle. I could do clay without any thought, without any doubt. I knew nothing about clay and yet the skill came out of my hands. Clay was all I had—all that I was. Clay was all that was left of me. I was an animal that made pots.

We don't think the way they want us to," the girl said. "And they'll kill us for it. But not until we've pried the worldskull open and put our needles in.

The cliques formed a shadow government in C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imitating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun obfuscation. The forms of power and its realities had been gently disentangled.

We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That's what government is for.

Remember, people, a spike is a passing thing, but a lawsuit you always have with you. Over.