Cory Doctorow quotes

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Determination #Kids #Cash

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
-- Cory Doctorow

#World #Firsts #First Time

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Writing #Silence #Inner Peace

We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Engineering #Yesterday #Care

The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Hands #Facts #Somewhere Out There

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Crooks #Calling #Want

Like all security, privacy is hard.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Privacy #Security

... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Book #Drm #Roaches

If this prinicpal thinks blogging isn't educational, he needs his head examined: he should be seeking out every student blogger in the school and giving them special time to blog more - and giving them extra credit besides.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Funny #Educational #School

It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!
-- Cory Doctorow

#Country #Stupid #Winning

It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Mistake #Decision #Rational

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Kings #Conversation

Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Keys #Giving #Wish

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Men #Safety #People

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Long #Cynical #Negative

We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Fighting #Winning #Battle

[O]pen platforms and experimental amateurs ... eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. ... Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Technology #Trying #Use

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Laptops #Deep Relationship

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Running #Book #Character

This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Technology #Giving #Privacy

Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Garden #Perfect #Generations

The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Real #Giving #Done

I'm not a lawyer I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Drm #Mitzvah #Three

It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Hard Work #Race #Age

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Writing #Fiction #Stories

Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Fiction #Tales #Surreal

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Important #Failing #Working It

Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the nest day - that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you're writing.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Writing #Creative #Leaving

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Listening #Rooms

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Book #Reading #Mean

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?
-- Cory Doctorow

#War #Winning #Surveillance

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Dark #Secret

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Battle #Firsts #Casualties

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Animal #Roaring #Bigs

I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?
-- Cory Doctorow

#Airplane #Eye #Technology

Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.
-- Cory Doctorow

#School #Different #Crime

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Past #Stories #Slides

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Book #People #Pirate

I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Years #Waiting #Whole Life

I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds. It's quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Running #Play #Rocks

I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Girl #Guy #Height

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it
-- Cory Doctorow

#Email #Archives

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Stupid #Past #Opposites

Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Coffee #Black #Ottomans

I don't know anything about press conferences." "Oh, just Google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Mean #Successful #Shoes

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Stupid #Thinking #People

The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders?
-- Cory Doctorow

#Borders #Sticks #Should

He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Years #Drunk #Waiting

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Kids #Would Be #Littles

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Country #Home #Years

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Novel #Critical

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Peers #Stuff #Exciting

We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Names #Copies

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
-- Cory Doctorow

#Fighting #What If #Lightning

No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Jobs #Sleep #Should

Write even when the world is chaotic.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Writing #World #Chaotic

It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Careers

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face
-- Cory Doctorow

#Ideas #Dumb #Faces

Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Ideas #People #Stuff

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Robots #World #Isaac

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Math #Doors #Car

The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Obscurity #Problem #Bigs

Run in circles, scream and shout,
-- Cory Doctorow

#Running #Circles #Scream

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Feelings #Cards

The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?
-- Cory Doctorow

#Association #Social Network #Cop

Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
-- Cory Doctorow

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Looks #Elements #Down And

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Girl #Ebay #Games

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Kings #Islands #Choices

If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?
-- Cory Doctorow

#Block #Surgeons

Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks
-- Cory Doctorow

#Hands #Digital #Distribution

Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
-- Cory Doctorow

#People #People Can Change #Dead People

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ... Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Ideas #Today #Harder

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Guy

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
-- Cory Doctorow

#Abnormal #Normal #Common