Quotes from Cory Doctorow

But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.

Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens in fiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so their triumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of the yogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut acid this morning is finitely more tragic than the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. The yogurt was alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliet never lived in the first place.

Otto von Bismarck quipped, Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

We're not making a world without greed, Jacob. We're making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn't mean you don't get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.

They're kids. If they understood risks, they wouldn't join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place. Not a better one, of course. But simpler.

I'm suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with 'step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,' especially if you can't do anything else until step one is done.

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.

Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck.

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.

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

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.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

Every wonderful thing in our world has a fight in its history: our rights, our good fortune, our happiness. All that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better.

Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo, which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.

Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn't give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit.

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

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

I have given this offer more consideration than it is due already. Now, fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying 'You Can't Fuck Off Past Here.' Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.

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?

But what if all the workers we went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he [the boss] went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there is a just reason for doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere, demanded this treatment?

Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!

It was so easy for an old normal to make way for a new one, so easy to blot the memories of that old normal. That was a skill that had served her well, but in that bite and its honey, she'd counted the cost for the first time.

In the words of Ice-T, "Do I look like a motherfuckin' role model?

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.