Cory Doctorow > Quotes

“When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
― Cory Doctorow

“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”
― 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

“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.”
― Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

“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, Little Brother

“Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“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

“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!”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
― Cory Doctorow

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“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, Little Brother

“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, For The Win

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. ”
― Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe

“The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it”
― 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, Little Brother

“We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.”
― Cory Doctorow

“He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.”
― Cory Doctorow, Makers

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“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

“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, Little Brother

“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

“Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“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

“The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.

There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through them. "When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits -- especially not the apple." It was a quote one of his economics profs had kept written in the corner of his white-board, and any time a student started droning on about compassion for the poor, the old prof would just tap the board and say, "Are you willing to share your lunch with 30,000 people?”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“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, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present

“The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders?”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“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, For The Win

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win

“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, Little Brother

“We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming--TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“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, Little Brother

“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, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century

“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, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

“It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building--it's hive-mind [stuff:]. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing!”
― Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

“... my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”
― Cory Doctorow, Makers

“... 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, Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century

“Any outfit that can’t figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can’t benefit from my advice.”
― Cory Doctorow, Makers

“Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.”
― Cory Doctorow, Makers

“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, For The Win

“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, For The Win