Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't.

I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.

That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.

Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.

you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.

Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.

Any complex system is sport for a hacker;

Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals.

The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?

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

When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.

He's a sucking chest wound of a human being.

But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs. Dotta's job is more important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job without Mrs. Dotta's factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn't have a factory without Mamaji's work, right?

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you're out, mate.

Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.

This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess.

She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them. She wouldn't do it.

Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.

I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.

the momentous arises only from the trivial.

YA doesn't get librarians fired!