Quotes from Cory Doctorow

The officiant was a prominent Cambridge hacker, one of the ones they'd hauled in when they were after Chelsea Manning. She'd been a kid then, but now she looked older, her wife holding their kids on her lap off to one side. She wore a colander on her head, because she was ordained in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was frankly too much.

it turned out she just made good money working for a law firm that did a lot of western business and didn't mind having a trans girl for a paralegal.

teach a woman to phish…")

She reminded me of some of the women I'd known in the Middle East, brave fuckers who'd managed to look like a million bucks even as their cities were being pounded to gravel around their pretty shoulders, fearless beneath their hijabs and glamorous even when they were covered in dust and blood.

Then he notices, he's a he again. Why not. Gender is just a slider.

No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human does

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.

The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.

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

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.

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

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

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

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

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 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.

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!

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

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

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

Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing (live-action role playing) an incredibly boring RPG (role-playing game) called "professionalism" that requires them to alter their vocabulary, posture, eating habits, facial expressions--every detail all the way down to what they allow themselves to find funny.

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.

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.