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Quotes from Islands in the Net — Bruce Sterling

born 1954 United States

← All quotes by Bruce Sterling

12 quotes

When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Agriculture is the oldest and most vicious of humanity’s bio-technologies.

Islands in the Net (1988)

She’d read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world’s havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five.

Islands in the Net (1988)

I’ll grant you good intentions, but intentions don’t count for much. Corruption—that’s what counts.

Islands in the Net (1988)

The world doesn’t give a shit how noble your motives are—it’ll roll right over you. That’s how it works.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don’t innovate. And it’s innovation that’s the real threat.

Islands in the Net (1988)

The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn’t care about the landscape inside people’s heads.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Where there’s war, there’s whores.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Real life was where the baby was.

Islands in the Net (1988)

The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Laura listened to their crude P. R. with sour amusement. They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets.

Islands in the Net (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Bruce Sterling (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.