American - Writer | March 17, 1948 -
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
William Gibson
GoodEvilThinkBecomeOnlyApply
The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
GreatBookTreesThinkImpactDown
The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.
HistoryPastSchoolLearnNowWill
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
DailyTechnologyChildrenNation
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
TechnologyTimeRightWasteNet
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
LightCityMindDataLightsHuman
Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
GenerationDeadMeanOldYearsCome
Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?
TimeChildNothingWhyTeachers
For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.
HeartChildhoodBoyDeadWhatever
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
ScienceInfluenceCareerWantMy Own
I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
ScienceMeAmericanScience Fiction
I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
BookThinkNeverOpeningChanged
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