Quote

A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.

William Gibson

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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Moral
Morals
Nations
Consists
Individual
Laws
Given
Soon
Doe
Nation
Without
Heard
Time
Situation
Situational
Law
Consist

More quotes by William Gibson

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Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.
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We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
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I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me.
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We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
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The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
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If there's a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case's point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.
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I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
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The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
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The prefix cyber is going the way of the prefix electro.
William Gibson
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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.
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I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas.
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The present tense made him nervous.
William Gibson
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I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.
William Gibson
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His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
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We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
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Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.
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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
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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
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I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
William Gibson