Walkaway Quotes

“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, Walkaway

“Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“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, Walkaway

“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“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, Walkaway

“Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Every time I hear someone saying that money is bullshit, I check to see how much money they have.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you’re never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn’t that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around—”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“There’s more than one way to be smart. People like my dad assume that because they’re smart about being evil bastards, they’re smart about everything—”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.” “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?” “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“YA doesn't get librarians fired!”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“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, Walkaway

“They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you’re never going to make a difference.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.” “That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules?”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“We can live like it's the first days of a better world, not the like it's the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can't have us. We withdraw our company.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“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. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, 'the stories you tell come true.' If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you'll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“And I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.” “That’s exactly right,” she said. “His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgement, we invite game-playing and states-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we'll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway