92+ Cory Doctorow Quotes On Technology, Education And Writing

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian journalist, blogger, and science fiction author. He is the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, and his writing focuses on technology, digital rights, and copyright issues. Doctorow is a strong advocate for free culture and open access to information, and he has written several books, including the novel Little Brother. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Cory Doctorow on technology, education, writing.

Top 10 Cory Doctorow Quotes

1. All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.
2. Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
3. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
4. The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.
5. Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
6. The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.
7. 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.
8. Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.
9. Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.
10. ... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.

Cory Doctorow Short Quotes

• The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.
• The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.
• It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
• Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.
• I choose YouTube over telly.
• It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.
• No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.
• It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.
• It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.
• Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

Cory Doctorow Quotes About Writing

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

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement. — Cory Doctorow

Write even when the world is chaotic. — Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Quotes About Books

It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw. — Cory Doctorow

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books. — Cory Doctorow

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending. — Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Cory Doctorow

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. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing. — 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. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning! — 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. — Cory Doctorow

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. — Cory Doctorow

The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy. — Cory Doctorow

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

We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

Like all security, privacy is hard. — Cory Doctorow

Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot. — Cory Doctorow

These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales. — 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. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. — Cory Doctorow

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust. — Cory Doctorow

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

Technology giveth and technology taketh away. — Cory Doctorow

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore. — Cory Doctorow

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action. — Cory Doctorow

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! — Cory Doctorow

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face — 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. — Cory Doctorow

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it — Cory Doctorow

We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead. — Cory Doctorow

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

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

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? — 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? — 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. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ... Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed. — Cory Doctorow

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

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

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

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

I don't know anything about press conferences." "Oh, just Google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help. — Cory Doctorow

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

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail. — Cory Doctorow

Freedom is something you have to take for yourself. — Cory Doctorow

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

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack. — Cory Doctorow

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring. — Cory Doctorow

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. — 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. — Cory Doctorow

Life Lessons by Cory Doctorow

1. Cory Doctorow exemplifies the power of using technology to spread important messages and information.
2. He also demonstrates the importance of staying informed and advocating for social change through writing and activism.
3. His work shows that it is possible to use technology to make a positive difference in the world.