Cory Doctorow Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better. — Cory Doctorow

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

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. — Cory Doctorow

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:
a certain amount of difficulty
plus
a certain amount of your friends
plus
a certain amount of interesting strangers
plus
a certain amount of reward
plus
a certain amount of opportunity
equaled
fun — Cory Doctorow

The problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

Sysadmins don't take holidays — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

Start at the beginning," he said. "Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don't need a plan, you need a vector. — Cory Doctorow

For me the major turning point in my working life was when I figured out that the work I produced when I felt inspired wasn't any different from the work I produced when I felt uninspired
at least a few months later. I think that "inspiration" has to do with your own confidence in your ideas, your blood sugar, the external pressures in your life, and a million other factors only tangentially related to the actual quality of the work. If creative work makes you sane and happy (and if it supports you financially), it's terrible to harness it to something you can't control, like "inspiration"
it sucks to only be happy when something you can't control occurs. — Cory Doctorow

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action ... — Cory Doctorow

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

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

Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here - the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't. — Cory Doctorow

He ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up. He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams. — Cory Doctorow

Haven't you figured it out? Giving money away doesn't solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It's pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What's more, they've done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. — Cory Doctorow

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

I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger? — Cory Doctorow

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

If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech - not censorship - then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

We're not making a world without greed, Jacob. We're making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong.
Our winning doesn't mean you don't get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

But what if all the workers we went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he [the boss] went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there is a just reason for doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere, demanded this treatment? — Cory Doctorow

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

Run in circles, scream and shout, — Cory Doctorow

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? — Cory Doctorow

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

That's what made the panics about huge zero-day security ruptures such a fright: the sudden knowledge that everything might have been auto-pwned by a random crim or asshole who used a skin-detection algorithm to catch you masturbating, keywords to flag your embarrassing conversations, harvesting your biometrics for playback attacks on your finances and social nets. — Cory Doctorow

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. — Cory Doctorow

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

You're awfully sure of yourself, aren't you? But ask yourself this: How can you know that you didn't spring up fully formed, all of these little convictions stamped upon you? Or, even if your little origin myth is true, how do you know you weren't tampered with? Maybe someone forked you and then intentionally changed your parameters to make you believe what you do. Don't you think it's awfully convenient that there was a totally unsuspected corner of my identity that was willing to chuck out a lifetime of refusal and revulsion in favor of a full-throated embrace of the glories of disembodied life? — Cory Doctorow

I'd never really believed in terrorists before
I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me
starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia
that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning. — Cory Doctorow

If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble. — Cory Doctorow

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

I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink.
I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken
a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them. — Cory Doctorow

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

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. — Cory Doctorow

That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care. Zottas cooked the process so they get all the money and own the political process, pay as much or as little tax as they want. Sure, they pay most of the tax, because they've built a set of rules that gives them most of the money. Talking about 'taxpayers' means that the state's debt is to rich dudes, and anything it gives to kids or old people or sick people or disabled people is charity we should be grateful for, since none of those people are paying tax that justifies their rewards from Government Inc. — Cory Doctorow

But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs. Dotta's job is more important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job without Mrs. Dotta's factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn't have a factory without Mamaji's work, right? — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the "free market," then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we'll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let's hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public's rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is! — Cory Doctorow

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

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. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don't have to force them. And if you force them, they don't feel as good. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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. — Cory Doctorow

Leon's life was all about discipline. He'd heard a weight-loss guru once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really "listen to your body" and only eat until it signaled that it was full. Leon had listened to his body. It wanted three entire pepperoni and mushroom pizzas every single day, plus a rather large cake. And malted milkshakes, the old fashioned kind you could make in your kitchen with an antique Hamilton Beech machine in avocado-colored plastic, served up in a tall red anodized aluminum cup. Leon's body was extremely verbose on what it wanted him to shovel into it. So Leon ignored his body. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Cory Doctorow

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

Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing (live-action role playing) an incredibly boring RPG (role-playing game) called "professionalism" that requires them to alter their vocabulary, posture, eating habits, facial expressions
every detail all the way down to what they allow themselves to find funny. — Cory Doctorow

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

And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's standard for the high and mighty. [ ... ]
And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without the boss's permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase cost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a *lot* cheaper. And the people who have the power aren't going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them. — Cory Doctorow

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

From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets ((it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as quaffing. — Cory Doctorow

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