Cory Doctorow Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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

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

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I choose YouTube over telly.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

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.