17 Bruce Sterling Quotes on Politics

Bruce Sterling quotes on politics

2. As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute. The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up. These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.

7. An insane information-hungry KGB or a relatively open and decent government? Vote with your feet.

10. Events that Queen Victoria would recognize as outrages, frontier skirmishes or minor popular rebellions will be reclassified as 'war.' And so will major atrocities such as biological warfare and surreptitious nuclear explosions.

11. Get the hell away from those lunatics. Who the hell wants to live in a USA with a TIA in it? Why would you want to invest in that country? The currency would crash. The political elite would annihilate one another.

12. Googling is international. It's not just restricted to cranky Republicans who couldn't erase e-mail in their PROFS (Professional Office System). That's going to have more of an effect. It's difficult to escape a tragedy in your life that's not your own fault.

16. I don't think that Poindexter's nutty scheme has much real-world traction. I think the question's badly formulated, really.

24. I'll tell you what will happen if it were an effective TIA. There would immediately be a series of coups inside the Republican Party as the people who owned the KGB survival mechanism were systemically outed and 'Trent Lotted.'

26. I'm especially interested in Dubai's connection to the Bombay criminal underworld. Most zealots with guns gravitate toward organized crime, because it's a lot easier to have money and buy gunmen than it is to have gunmen and get money.

34. It would be profoundly destabilizing. Their sexual affairs would be public. They'd be 'Lewinskied.' They'd be 'Whitewatered.'

35. It's a destabilizing threat to democracy. In 'Tomorrow Now,' the chapter on politics talks about media toxicity - the outbirth of opposition research where nobody can ever be clean.

40. Last week I was in Italy hanging out with Linux freeware activists in a college event sponsored by a dance club that's run by some kind of anarchist dive with Communists, and feminists, and hackers, and the media, and professors, and guys with piercings who hate Berlusconi.

45. Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.

47. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

51. The common population would stand aghast as these people did one another in. It would not stop once the surveillance mechanism was there. It would eat generation after generation of KGB members until it decapitated and lobotomized the entire population.

54. There are no fronts, the commanding headquarters of generals can be smashed instantly and are number-one targets, supply lines can be interdicted at will, trans-border invasions by organized national armies are heavily disapproved by large coalitions of nations.

55. There are plenty of Republican senators now who know what happened to Trent Lott - how can they not? They have street smarts. They're aware that he was nailed because people happened to record something that was at the practical funeral of a centenarian.

58. War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.