Cory Doctorow Quotes

It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.

For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

Things are true or they aren’t, no matter how old the person saying them happens to be.

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

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

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

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.

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

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.

There’s something else,” he said. “What?” “I wasn’t going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do this.” “Jesus, Jolu, what?” “I hate to say it, but you’re white. I’m not. White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they’re about to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always been like that for us.

"... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out."

I'm not a lawyer— I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

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

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

Sysadmins don't take holidays