Top 150 Cory Doctorow Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

56. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

59. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

61. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

65. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

68. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

70. “I choose YouTube over telly.”

— Cory Doctorow

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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. “YA doesn’t get librarians fired!”

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

92. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

94. “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

95. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

— Cory Doctorow

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Cory Doctorow

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

— Cory Doctorow

100. “It’s hard not to like Asimov; he’s a really likable guy.”

— Cory Doctorow