Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Cory Doctorow

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.

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

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

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.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

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

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

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

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

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.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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

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

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

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.

I choose YouTube over telly.

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

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

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

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

... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

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

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

Open 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.

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

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

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.