Top 150 Cory Doctorow Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Cory Doctorow

2. “The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

4. “Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends – if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

6. “All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.”

— Cory Doctorow

7. “Like all security, privacy is hard.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

9. “The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.”

— Cory Doctorow

10. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.”

— Cory Doctorow

13. “It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

15. “It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

— Cory Doctorow

16. “Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you’re really having a deep relationship with it.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

19. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.”

— Cory Doctorow

20. “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

21. “If surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block, then why are you allowed to get writer’s block?”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

23. “Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

25. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

27. “Technology giveth and technology taketh away.”

— Cory Doctorow

28. “I think that Utopia is a theory of human action...”

— Cory Doctorow

29. “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

30. “This sounds like you’re saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.”

— Cory Doctorow

31. “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

32. “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

33. “The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

— Cory Doctorow

34. “He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being.”

— Cory Doctorow

35. “Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction’s most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.”

— Cory Doctorow

36. “There’s something really liberating about having some corner of your life that’s yours, that no one gets to see except you. It’s a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them.”

— Cory Doctorow

37. “Write even when the world is chaotic.”

— Cory Doctorow

38. “What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!”

— Cory Doctorow

39. “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

40. “Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding.”

— Cory Doctorow

41. “For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it’s time for them to help us to ignore.”

— Cory Doctorow

42. “Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the nest day – that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.”

— Cory Doctorow

43. “The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got.”

— Cory Doctorow

44. “Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers.”

— Cory Doctorow

45. “Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn’t a utopian is a shmuck.”

— Cory Doctorow

46. “The law didn’t care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.”

— Cory Doctorow

47. “In the words of Ice-T, “Do I look like a motherfuckin’ role model?”

— Cory Doctorow

48. “The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn’t the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you’re hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?”

— Cory Doctorow

49. “Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint.” He swallowed. “No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn’t just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.”

— Cory Doctorow

50. “The point is just that people usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it’s too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”

— Cory Doctorow