Cory Doctorow Quotes (53 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Works

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Cory Doctorow

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Cory Doctorow

Makers

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: 53 quotes 0 likes

Famous Cory Doctorow Quotes

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

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Little Brother (2008)

“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 book For the Win

Source: For the Win

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

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Source: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

“If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.”

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother

“Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still freeand we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?”

Cory Doctorow

“He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.”

Cory Doctorow Makers

Source: Makers

Cory Doctorow Quotes about people

“The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup—in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

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

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe

Eastern Standard Tribe (2004)

“There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character's actions through his own lens.”

Cory Doctorow

"In Praise of Fanfic" in Locus (May 2007) http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/05/cory-doctorow-in-praise-of-fanfic.html

“Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"A note about this book, January 9, 2003
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. 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.
Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.

“It was nice to think that the key to feeding nine billion people was to measure return on investment by maximizing calories and minimizing misery, instead of minimizing capital investment and maximizing retained earnings to shareholders.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 166

“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

Cory Doctorow

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

Cory Doctorow Quotes about time

“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

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

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother (2008)

“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.”

Cory Doctorow

"Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks", O'Reilly (11 February 2009) http://blip.tv/file/1996369/

“Christ, you're dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they'll say. They'll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn, terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They'll tell us that any tool for communicating that they can't tap, log, and switch off is irresponsible. They'll tell us we're stealing from ISPs. It's what they say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around the world same song.”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

“First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"A note about this book, January 9, 2003
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

“Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you’re doing is thinking about what you’re going to be doing to go on doing what you’re doing. Worrying about whether you’ve got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you’re getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It’s being alive, but it’s hardly living.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 114

Cory Doctorow: Trending quotes

“I’d seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: I’d seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work.
Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren’t perfect. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better.

Imagination

“It’s important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I’ll be when it’s restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It’s important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.

“I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: I’d talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He’d tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one’s personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory.
This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

Intelligence , Strong , Future , Victory

Cory Doctorow Quotes

“The universe gets older. So do I.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Universe

“Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the "good guys" are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security.”

Cory Doctorow

"Encryption won't work if it has a back door only the 'good guys' have keys to" in The Guardian (1 May 2015) http://theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/01/encryption-wont-work-if-it-has-a-back-door-only-the-good-guys-have-keys-to-
Context: It's impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security.... Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the "good guys" are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

Guy

“As someone once said, "Just because you're not interested in politics does not mean that politics won't be interested in you."”

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow on the Open Rights Group (Time: 3:25) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Cory_Doctorow_on_the_Open_Rights_Group.webm
Context: As someone once said, "Just because you're not interested in politics does not mean that politics won't be interested in you." And staying away from politics either because you think tech will make laws irrelevant or because there's no good way to influence laws just opens the field for people who don't cherish either of those illusions to make things very bad indeed.

“I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"A note about this book, February 12, 2004"
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.
When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC's most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a "some rights reserved" regime would serve me well, I still couldn't shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.
It wasn't foolish.

Books , Way , Success

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

Cory Doctorow

“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

Source: Little Brother

Life , Freedom , Waiting

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

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother

School

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

Cory Doctorow

“If you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.”

Cory Doctorow book Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema
Variant: you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.

Failure , Success

“The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.”

Cory Doctorow book For the Win

Source: For the Win

Future

“Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.”

Cory Doctorow Little Brother

Source: Little Brother (2008)

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.”

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe

Source: Eastern Standard Tribe

Past

“Open platforms and experimental amateurs … eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. … Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.”

Cory Doctorow

"Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)" on BoingBoing (2 April 2010) http://boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-yo.html

“The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained—tending bar, mopping toilets—commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Life

“No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

Sleep

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

Cory Doctorow

"Pwned: How copyright turns us all into IP serfs", UNC iBiblio (22 February 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkBX-981_es

Decision

“A tablet without software is just an inconveniently fragile and poorly reflective mirror, so the thing I want to be sure of when I buy a device is that I don't have to implicitly trust one corporation's judgment about what software I should and shouldn't be using.”

Cory Doctorow

"Why Samsung's Galaxy Tab is 'meh'" in The Guardian (25 July 2011) http://theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh

“Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Lying

“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Art , Hell , Thinking

“I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.”

Cory Doctorow

"Where is my flying car?", 3rd Degree (September 2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20110305022421/http://3degree.ecu.edu.au/articles/1378

Science , Future , Clothes

“I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

First lines
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Death , World , Dreams , Learning

“I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

World , Parting

“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. Every London cop who stops someone from taking a picture of a public building, every TSA agent who takes away your kid's toothpaste, every NSA spook who wiretaps your email, does the terrorist's job for him. Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.”

Cory Doctorow

"BBC photographer prevented from shooting St Paul's because he might be 'al Qaeda operative'" BoingBoing (30 November 2009) http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/30/bbc-photographer-pre.html

“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

Microsoft Research DRM talk http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt(17 June 2004)

“Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

Hate , Coffee

“One form of math denial is the belief in the ability to make computers that prevent copyright infringement. Computers only ever work by making copies: restricting copying on the internet is like restricting wetness in water.”

Cory Doctorow

The FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn't make it possible http://theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/24/the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-only-it-can-use-but-wanting-it-doesnt-make-it-possible in The Guardian (24 February 2016)

Water

“It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

“They just hated and feared us because our government hated and feared them.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 154

Fear , Hate

“The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who’ll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no ‘world hunger’ problem. There’s a corruption problem. There’s a greed problem. There’s a gullibility problem....”
“So there’s a corruption problem,” I said. “Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?”

Cory Doctorow

“What, you mean like every single one of them?”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 149 (ellipsis represents a brief elision of text)

Money , Hunger , Law , Food

“Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 148