Cory Doctorow Quotes

– Here, take this. It'll give you a boost.
– You spent 90 gold on this??
– 90 gold is nothing when you're the baddest bitch in the virtual universe.

"Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo," which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.

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

I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.” “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence — she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?” “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.

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?

Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint.” He swallowed. “No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn’t just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

Sysadmins don't take holidays

The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley’s board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.

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.

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

YA doesn't get librarians fired!

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.

you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

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