All quotes

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you're there.

If you can't do what you want, do what you can.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

I don't confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is...the higher achievement.

Half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damn rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer…

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

Case: Are you sentient, or not? Dixie Flatline: Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess… But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI…

You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.

I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see...

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the…

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

The earliest histories were medleys of self-serving heroisms and mini-dramas that were meant as morality plays and were not to be taken literally.

Anyone on the receiving end of the Juvenile Delinquent Education Facility in Johannesburg called it the Grinder. The education given there was two-fold: learn your books and learn to never come back. Six hours a day spent in class. Six…

In his experience, war made hypocrites out of everyone. It turned black and white into gray, right and wrong into neutral, perhaps war could even mix water and oil. He considered himself to be a man with clear principles and allegiance…

His six colleagues — each representing one of the members of the United Planets — were all present in the flesh. They had to be; electronic diplomacy was not possible over solar-system distances. Some elder statesmen, accustomed to the…

A hundred years earlier, a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but the skills…

What did depress him sometimes was the need for dealing, year after year, with the same familiar faces. The marvels of medicine were all very well — and certainly he had no desire to put back the clock — but there were men around this…