Cory Doctorow Quotes

There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing).

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.

The problem isn’t that the world has the wrong kind of sellers; it’s that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny, and insubstantial.

It was nice to think that the key to feeding nine billion people was to measure return on investment by maximizing calories and minimizing misery, instead of minimizing capital investment and maximizing retained earnings to shareholders.

They just hated and feared us because our government hated and feared them.

It’s a bitch when someone reminds you of all the contradictions in your life, I know. Your discomfort doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true, though. Come on, you all know this is true. Late-stage capitalism isn’t reformable. It’s an idea whose time has passed.

Greg, what are you talking about? Ending corruption? Like there’s a version of this society that isn’t corrupt? Corruption isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. It’s baked in. The whole idea of using markets to figure out who gets what is predicated on corruption—it’s a way to paper over the fact that some people get a lot, most of us get not much, and so we invent a deus ex machina called market forces that hands out money based on merit. How do we know that the market is giving it to deserving people? Well, look at all the money they have! It’s just circular reasoning.

The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who'll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no 'world hunger' problem. There's a corruption problem. There's a greed problem. There's a gullibility problem...."
"So there's a corruption problem," I said. "Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?"
"What, you mean like every single one of them?

Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.

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

And don’t talk to me about having a positive attitude. The reason all those who’ve died of cancer croaked is because they had cancer, not because they were too gloomy.

He was a pushy, self-righteous prig, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. Necessarily.

Existence proofs always trump theory. That’s engineering.

Look, whatever else happiness is, it's also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We've had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on."
"Yes," I said. "Sure. At some level, that's true of all our emotions, I guess."
"I don't know about that," she said. "I'm just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they'll race past you.