Cory Doctorow Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Cory Doctorow
The companies are multinational — why should labor still stick to borders?

Cory Doctorow
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
It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.

Cory Doctorow
You know, there comes a point where you're not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you're just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing.

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

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

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

Cory Doctorow
These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

Cory Doctorow
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.

Cory Doctorow
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
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

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

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

Cory Doctorow