Top 150 Cory Doctorow Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’d never been a tall guy, and the girls I’d dated had all been my height – teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.”

— Cory Doctorow

52. “The other one I did was ‘I, Robot.’ I take apart Isaac Asimov’s Robots world.”

— Cory Doctorow

53. “Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.”

— Cory Doctorow

54. “Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.”

— Cory Doctorow

55. “Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.”

— Cory Doctorow

56. “That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

58. “We don’t care about what you did yesterday – we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.”

— Cory Doctorow

59. “Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.”

— Cory Doctorow

60. “Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs or engaging in unprofessional email conduct, it’s purely out of their own goodwill.”

— Cory Doctorow

61. “They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”

— Cory Doctorow

62. “With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

— Cory Doctorow

63. “I choose YouTube over telly.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

66. “We have a name for things that don’t copy themselves: dead.”

— Cory Doctorow

67. “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

68. “That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn’t work.”

— Cory Doctorow

69. “Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it’s impossible to win by doing nothing.”

— Cory Doctorow

70. “Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.”

— Cory Doctorow

71. “But you technical people have a disease: it’s called ‘solutionism.’ You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there’s another, worse problem that’ll burst into life the moment the current one is ’solved.”

— Cory Doctorow

72. “I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done.”

— Cory Doctorow

73. “I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what’s going on in my life.”

— Cory Doctorow

74. “So far, I’ve managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend.”

— Cory Doctorow

75. “The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.”

— Cory Doctorow

76. “She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn’t afford to anger them. She wouldn’t do it.”

— Cory Doctorow

77. “YA doesn’t get librarians fired!”

— Cory Doctorow

78. “Any outfit that can’t figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can’t benefit from my advice.”

— Cory Doctorow

79. “But if you’re not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you’ll always be ignorant.”

— Cory Doctorow

80. “I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.”

— Cory Doctorow

81. “The companies are multinational – why should labor still stick to borders?”

— Cory Doctorow

82. “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

— Cory Doctorow

83. “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

84. “I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.”

— Cory Doctorow

85. “For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams.”

— Cory Doctorow

86. “Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.”

— Cory Doctorow

87. “Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

89. “A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.”

— Cory Doctorow

90. “It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.”

— Cory Doctorow

91. “So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.”

— Cory Doctorow

92. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

— Cory Doctorow

93. “The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don’t share doesn’t do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.”

— Cory Doctorow

94. “One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.”

— Cory Doctorow

95. “It’s part of a cycle of stories I’m writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.”

— Cory Doctorow

96. “Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit.”

— Cory Doctorow

97. “These guys are the world’s biggest welfare queens, after all – suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I’m guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.”

— Cory Doctorow

98. “Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.”

— Cory Doctorow

99. “The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There’s lots of good stuff on the ballot.”

— Cory Doctorow

100. “Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.”

— Cory Doctorow