Best 102 quotes of Cory Doctorow on MyQuotes

Cory Doctorow

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    Cory Doctorow

    Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

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    Cory Doctorow

    All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks

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    Cory Doctorow

    Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?

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    Cory Doctorow

    Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

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    Cory Doctorow

    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.

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    Cory Doctorow

    I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

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    Cory Doctorow

    I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.

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    Cory Doctorow

    I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds. It's quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo.

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    Cory Doctorow

    If surgeons don't get surgeon's block, then why are you allowed to get writer's block?

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    Cory Doctorow

    If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble.

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    Cory Doctorow

    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.

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    Cory Doctorow

    If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

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    Cory Doctorow

    I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

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    Cory Doctorow

    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?

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    Cory Doctorow

    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.

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    Cory Doctorow

    ... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.

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    Cory Doctorow

    I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

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    Cory Doctorow

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

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    Cory Doctorow

    It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.

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    Cory Doctorow

    It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.

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    Cory Doctorow

    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.

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    Cory Doctorow

    It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

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    Cory Doctorow

    It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Like all security, privacy is hard.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about *everything* online. What's more, they've done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Open platforms and experimental amateurs eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the nest day - that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you're writing.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.

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    Cory Doctorow

    Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

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    Cory Doctorow

    The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

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    Cory Doctorow

    The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

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    Cory Doctorow

    The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders?

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    Cory Doctorow

    The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.

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    Cory Doctorow

    The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

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    Cory Doctorow

    The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.