Cory Doctorow Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!

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.

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

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

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

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

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.

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

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?

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.

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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.

The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?

I choose YouTube over telly.

No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.

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.

... 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.

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

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?