Cory Doctorow > Quotes

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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing (live-action role playing) an incredibly boring RPG (role-playing game) called "professionalism" that requires them to alter their vocabulary, posture, eating habits, facial expressions--every detail all the way down to what they allow themselves to find funny.”
― Cory Doctorow, In Real Life

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

“If you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.”
― Cory Doctorow, Pirate Cinema

“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

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

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

“Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“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

“... 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

“I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?”
― Cory Doctorow, Homeland