Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.

This sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the Constitution.

Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.

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

So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.

I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?

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

She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.

It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building--it's hive-mind [stuff:]. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing!

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It's like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun: a certain amount of difficulty plus a certain amount of your friends plus a certain amount of interesting strangers plus a certain amount of reward plus a certain amount of opportunity equaled fun

We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming--TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!

What you've got to understand, son," says the doctor, "is it's all the fault of the alien space bats.

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people. Those were not his dumplings.

s security expert Bruce Schneier has said, Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet.

T]hat little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn't going to ever pay consequences for her action, it wasn't because "the system" failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solution from now on.

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free.

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

I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn't given a damn.

The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.

People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don't have to force them. And if you force them, they don't feel as good.