Top 100 Cory Doctorow Quotes
#2. 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
#3. The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.
Cory Doctorow
#4. 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
#5. It was like finding Attila the Hun at a yoga class. Like finding Darth Vader playing ultimate Frisbee in the park. Like finding Megatron volunteering at a children's hospital. Like finding Nightmare Moon having a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.
Cory Doctorow
#6. 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
#7. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.
Cory Doctorow
#8. Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just do it.
Cory Doctorow
#9. When in problem, or in doubt, run in cirles, scream and shout
Cory Doctorow
#10. 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
#11. It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.
Cory Doctorow
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
Cory Doctorow
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.
Cory Doctorow
#19. It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
Cory Doctorow
#20. I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.
Cory Doctorow
#21. 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
#23. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#24. Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways a security system fails.
Cory Doctorow
#25. I'm suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with 'step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,' especially if you can't do anything else until step one is done.
Cory Doctorow
#26. What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?
Cory Doctorow
#27. 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
#28. Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.
Cory Doctorow
#29. Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free.
Cory Doctorow
#30. The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.
Cory Doctorow
#31. Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.
Cory Doctorow
#32. 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
#33. It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.
Cory Doctorow
#35. So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.
Cory Doctorow
#36. There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at.
Cory Doctorow
#37. You want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.
Cory Doctorow
#38. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.
Cory Doctorow
#39. 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
#40. Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.
Cory Doctorow
#41. This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.
Cory Doctorow
#42. Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.
Cory Doctorow
#43. 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
#44. He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.
Cory Doctorow
#46. 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
#47. Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks
Cory Doctorow
#49. if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it
Cory Doctorow
#50. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#51. But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.
Cory Doctorow
#52. 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
#53. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
Cory Doctorow
#54. Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.
Cory Doctorow
#55. 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
#56. My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.
Cory Doctorow
#57. The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face
Cory Doctorow
#58. No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.
Cory Doctorow
#59. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#60. These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.
Cory Doctorow
#61. Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.
Cory Doctorow
#62. I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn't given a damn.
Cory Doctorow
#63. If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
Cory Doctorow
#64. This life is real too. We're communicating aren't we?
Cory Doctorow
#65. I think that Utopia is a theory of human action ...
Cory Doctorow
#66. 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
#67. S security expert Bruce Schneier has said, Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet.
Cory Doctorow
#68. The companies are multinational
why should labor still stick to borders?
Cory Doctorow
#70. Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
Cory Doctorow
#71. If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?
Cory Doctorow
#72. We don't care about what you did yesterday - we care about what you're going to do tomorrow.
Cory Doctorow
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
Cory Doctorow
#76. A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.
Cory Doctorow
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. For me
for pretty much every writer
the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Cory Doctorow
#81. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
Cory Doctorow
#82. We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.
Cory Doctorow
#83. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#84. 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?
Cory Doctorow
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#87. 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
#88. Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck.
Cory Doctorow
#89. If you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.
Cory Doctorow
#91. Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
Cory Doctorow
#92. I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.
Cory Doctorow
#93. 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.
Cory Doctorow
#94. We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming
TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!
Cory Doctorow
#95. 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
#96. The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.
Cory Doctorow
#97. 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
#98. All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.
Cory Doctorow
#99. For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.
Cory Doctorow
#100. The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "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
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