Cory Doctorow Quotes

You know, there comes a point where you're not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you're just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. That's not very fucking helpful, you know. I'm holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it's not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I'm capable of.

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

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

Existence proofs always trump theory. That’s engineering.

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

I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?

"I hate that," I said. "It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?"

I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?

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

I’d seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups—I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work. Suneep looked sheepish. “Well, if all I have to do is satisfy myself that my plans are good and my buildings won’t fall down, I can make it happen very fast. Of course, my plans aren’t perfect. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through a project when someone suggests a new flourish or approach that makes the whole thing immeasurably better.

Here’s a free tip,” his father says: “The feds aren’t terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here — the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.

Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.

All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans.

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.

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!