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Cyberpunk Quotes

Browse 97 quotes about Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk Quotes

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”

“Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything-depends-on-it first-week-of-being-madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere while Daddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there... Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have. There's all the good things on this ticket, and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.”

“With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.”

“She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in… She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette's, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you could feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It's called money, Lanette said. It's called money. You just slip it in.”

“You look like you’ve been on a month-long bender. Have you?” “No, Ken, I have not. I’ve just had a long week.” Walked the streets of a city bathed in blood and stood amid a hundred thousand corpses. Negotiated a three-way peace treaty among opposing factions of a warring alien species who’d previously held me captive. Bullied the Metigen leadership into doing my bidding. Found out we’re not the real humans, and the real humans are currently enslaving the real universe. Oh, and I think I’m addicted to my ship. How was your week? “Nothing a shower and some food won’t fix.”

“There's an ugly truth buried beneath the utopian economies they've crafted: that behind the surface of every American product and every European privilege is the blood of the Global South. How else could a continent with so few natural resources become so wealthy? It wasn't the gun that brought forth the Empire, but the man who dared to wield it. The bullets fueled the bloodshed, and the bloodshed fueled the profit. Such constructs the algorithm. So goes the computation. And therein lies the legacy of the American Empire: blood, bullets, and dollar bills. These are the second millennium building blocks with which third millennium technology and artificial intelligence were made. Who could blame it for carrying that legacy into the future?”

“He didn’t have the courage to wait until the old man finished praying. He had no idea how he should respond to the question he was certain would come from the man’s lips. Making a hasty sign of the cross, he placed his hand on the headstone—for the first and last time. Feeling something stronger and more meaningful than anything he had experienced before, he nodded goodbye to the old man and quickly walked toward the cemetery gate.”

“Alex thrust her hand and half her arm into the labyrinth of light. Her stare blanked, and in the halo of the matrix her eyes and glyphs blazed so radiantly she looked as if she were being consumed by a primordial fire. “She just stuck her hand into Machim Command’s central server matrix!” Caleb smiled, watching on in blatant awe. “She does that.”

“The woman’s gaze sent chills racing down his spine. The diabolical, aberrantly predatory arch of her lips curdled his blood. Seriously, his blood must be curdling back at the lab right now. “Nice illusion. I’m definitely feeling the evil vibe here.” She stood and rounded the desk with perfect grace. “There is no illusion. Explain yourself quickly now, before I grow bored by your presence and dispense with it.”

“As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.”

“The full force of the sun’s rays broke through the tree canopy, and the man squinted up at the sky. “I always assumed Asterions would figure it out when they were ready for the knowledge. When they were ready to take the next step. By my count, you’re a little early.” “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the next evolutionary leap to mosey through on its own. To put it bluntly, we are dead in two weeks unless we can find a way to stop the Rasu. Dead. As a species. Do you understand me? Am I getting through to you?” “Calm yourself, Mr. Ridani. I hear you fine.” “Good. Then will you come with me?”

“The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of undone things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing. He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it. He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane's howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption's endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star's heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast. Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality. He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction. Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity. Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals. He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together. He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.”

“I’ll ask you to look at the ships arrayed against you and consider what weaponry they might possess. Weaponry strong enough to crack your hulls? I know what weaponry you bring to bear, and I assure you it will not crack ours. “Are you willing to risk the lives of thousands under your command to find out? Are you willing to risk your own life?” The silence hung across space like a shroud. “This is not over, Admiral Solovy.” “That is the first true thing you’ve said today.”

“She’d never been on board a ship like this one. A real starship worthy of the name, where everything from the reinforced hull to the sophisticated instrumentation created a sense of presence, of consequentiality. When a vessel of this ilk cut a swath through the void, the void noticed. But Nicolette Hinotori had once commanded a generation ship, which meant buried in Nika’s core operating system was knowledge about the operation of such vessels. She stood in the center of the bridge, closed her eyes and asked herself a question. Results flooded her mind, and she hurriedly initiated a sort-and-prioritize algorithm to impose order on them. Then she gazed around the bridge with new eyes.”

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”

“Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.” Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.”

“Death still exists; what has disappeared is the certainty that everything will eventually end sooner or later. There's time to shave your head, time to let the gray hairs grow, time to get pregnant, to torture, to be the world champion, and to rewrite the encyclopedia. With patience, a single person could build the pyramids; with perseverance, another single person could knock them down. I guess destruction is another form of love.”