Cory Doctorow Quotes

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

When in problem, or in doubt, run in cirles, scream and shout

It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.

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

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

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

We don't care about what you did yesterday - we care about what you're going to do tomorrow.

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

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale.

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.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

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

Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.

Complaining about the universe's unfairness is never part of a successful strategy.

But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.

I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?

Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.

I'm not magic. You lead yourselves.

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

He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball.

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.

So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.

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

These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

This life is real too. We're communicating aren't we?

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

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

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

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

Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just do it.

Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

For me
for pretty much every writer
the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

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

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

If you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.

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

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck.

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.

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

I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.

Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.

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

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

Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers.

Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

What you've got to understand, son," says the doctor, "is it's all the fault of the alien space bats.

Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways a security system fails.

Otto von Bismarck quipped, Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

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

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

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

Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.

Sysadmins don't take holidays

The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.

You want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity

Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.

I choose YouTube over telly.

S security expert Bruce Schneier has said, Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet.

All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That is in the nature of secrets

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

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

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

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

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.

Run in circles, scream and shout,

Content isn't king. Conversation is.

We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming
TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!

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

Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.

Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.

You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars.

Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container?

This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.

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

I'd rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.

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

I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.

I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.

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

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

the momentous arises only from the trivial.

The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.

I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn't given a damn.

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

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend.

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

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.

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