Top 150 Cory Doctorow Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn’t given a damn.”

— Cory Doctorow

103. “Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!”

— Cory Doctorow

104. “They’re kids. If they understood risks, they wouldn’t join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place. Not a better one, of course. But simpler.”

— Cory Doctorow

105. “It’s as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.”

— Cory Doctorow

106. “The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of “lean, efficient” flexibility.”

— Cory Doctorow

107. “We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.”

— Cory Doctorow

108. “My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.”

— Cory Doctorow

109. “She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.”

— Cory Doctorow

110. “Any complex system is sport for a hacker;.”

— Cory Doctorow

111. “There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at.”

— Cory Doctorow

112. “The great mystery of being a human being is trying to figure out WTF all those other human beings are doing.”

— Cory Doctorow

113. “If this prinicpal thinks blogging isn’t educational, he needs his head examined: he should be seeking out every student blogger in the school and giving them special time to blog more – and giving them extra credit besides.”

— Cory Doctorow

114. “When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven’t even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.”

— Cory Doctorow

115. “This life is real too. We’re communicating aren’t we?”

— Cory Doctorow

116. “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

117. “But now I think that there’s no reason that Mrs. Dotta’s job is more important than my mother’s job. Mamaji wouldn’t have a job without Mrs. Dotta’s factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn’t have a factory without Mamaji’s work, right?”

— Cory Doctorow

118. “Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don’t Get iTunesed with your eBooks.”

— Cory Doctorow

119. “It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.”

— Cory Doctorow

120. “The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face.”

— Cory Doctorow

121. “Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better.”

— Cory Doctorow

122. “I’m not magic. You lead yourselves.”

— Cory Doctorow

123. “Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.”

— Cory Doctorow

124. “The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.”

— Cory Doctorow

125. “So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.”

— Cory Doctorow

126. “Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don’t check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business – they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn’t copyright protection: it’s middleman protection.”

— Cory Doctorow

127. “It was so easy for an old normal to make way for a new one, so easy to blot the memories of that old normal. That was a skill that had served her well, but in that bite and its honey, she’d counted the cost for the first time.”

— Cory Doctorow

128. “Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals.”

— Cory Doctorow

129. “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

130. “Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is finitely more tragic than the “deaths” of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place.”

— Cory Doctorow

131. “Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He’s always looking for ways a security system fails.”

— Cory Doctorow

132. “The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.”

— Cory Doctorow

133. “Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

— Cory Doctorow

134. “It’s a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.”

— Cory Doctorow

135. “It’s not necessarily about what career you pick. It’s about how you do what you do.”

— Cory Doctorow

136. “I’ve always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.”

— Cory Doctorow

137. “People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don’t have to force them. And if you force them, they don’t feel as good.”

— Cory Doctorow

138. “No, I mean I’m sorry that you’ve inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you’ve got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don’t get sick, where –.”

— Cory Doctorow

139. “When you teach your students that it’s “economically rational” to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.”

— Cory Doctorow

140. “Sometimes hard problems don’t have easy solutions.”

— Cory Doctorow

141. “It’s hard to pay your own way when you’re used to someone else picking up the tab.”

— Cory Doctorow

142. “She was in the zone, a human copressor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart.”

— Cory Doctorow

143. “This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”

— Cory Doctorow

144. “Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.”

— Cory Doctorow

145. “Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ‘the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”

— Cory Doctorow

146. “Never underestimate the power of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor, as a foolish boy once.”

— Cory Doctorow

147. “The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”

— Cory Doctorow

148. “That’s because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you’ve ever read has typos in it.”

— Cory Doctorow

149. “Computers can control you or they can lighten your work – if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.”

— Cory Doctorow

150. “Blowing them up or shooting them wasn’t right, but a world in which the wicked went about their days frightened of retribution was a more just one than a world where the wicked held their heads high.”

— Cory Doctorow