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

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

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

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
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.

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
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
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
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
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
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.

Cory Doctorow
... 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.

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
Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

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

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
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.

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
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.

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

Cory Doctorow
Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?

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

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

Cory Doctorow
If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

Cory Doctorow