Quotes from Cory Doctorow

The point is just that people usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it's too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you've had it stripped from you.

The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of "lean, efficient" flexibility.

It's hard to pay your own way when you're used to someone else picking up the tab.

Sometimes hard problems don't have easy solutions.

No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --

I was willing to bet that if I were a dude coming back to the Sofitel late at night with a couple of underage hookers, no one would bat an eye, state of emergency or no state of emergency. But let a lady try and show some sisterly solidarity, and suddenly it was ENFORCE ALL THE POLICIES. Fuck that.

Thank you, Herthe. It is stressful. She's a good friend, and she isn't a criminal." Which wasn't strictly true, but we both knew that I meant "criminal in the eyes of international human rights NGOs" not "criminal in the eyes of the Slovstakian justice system." Technically everyone alive was a criminal under Slovstakian justice, one way or another.

we're problems to be solved, not citizens. 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.

Was it just a coincidence that the only women who rose through the ranks in this industry acted like poster children for toxic masculinity? Was that my future, if I stayed in the business?

Even the bystander vegans couldn't ignore the racket.

There are some factors you can control, and some you can't. Wishing things were different won't make them different.

I don't even know who I was crying for. Me? Sruthi? Both? "Can I give you a hug?" Tanisha was a trailblazer in the whole consent movement.

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.

humans are bright enough to think our way out of the problems we think ourselves into.

The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

In short: if I'm wrong, I promise that I'll be wrong in a well-informed and interesting way.

So I want you to get all your friends to come to my place, tomorrow, after school. Five p.m. Tell them, anyone who doesn't come is not allowed to jailbreak anything ever again." He registered surprise. "You mean that if we come, we can still jailbreak?" She smiled and met Nadifa's eye. "Oh yes, my boy. We're not going to stop breaking the rules. We're just going to be smart about it.

It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.

I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.

The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don't reproduce. Don't consume. Don't trample the earth or you'll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven't gotten there?

His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position into it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.

People like my dad assume that because they're smart about being evil bastards, they're smart about everything—" "And because they're smart at everything," Seth said, "that makes it okay for them to be evil bastards?

there aren't any 'jobs' left. Just financial engineering and politics. I'm not qualified for either. For one thing, I can't say 'meritocracy' with a straight face.

Remember, it's not just 'to each according to her need,' it's 'from each according to her ability.' I know how to find factories that are perfect for direct action. I know how to get into them. I know how to pwnify their machines. I know how to throw a hell of a party. I have all this unearned, undeserved privilege. Apart from killing myself as an enemy of the human species, can you think of anything better for me to do with it?