Cory Doctorow quotes - page 3

We don't care about what you did yesterday-we care about what you're going to do tomorrow. (Cory Doctorow)
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning! View quote
Cory Doctorow
The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack. View quote
Cory Doctorow
Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot. View quote
Cory Doctorow
The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail. View quote
Cory Doctorow
It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction. View quote
Cory Doctorow
My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart. View quote
Cory Doctorow
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore. View quote
Cory Doctorow
I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life. View quote
Cory Doctorow
I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust. View quote
Cory Doctorow
The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who'll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no ‘world hunger' problem. There's a corruption problem. There's a greed problem. There's a gullibility problem....” "So there's a corruption problem,” I said. "Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them? (Cory Doctorow)
Look, whatever else happiness is, it's also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We've had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.” "Yes,” I said. "Sure. At some level, that's true of all our emotions, I guess. View quote
Cory Doctorow
I'd seen how Imagineering worked when they were on their own, building prototypes and conceptual mockups-I knew that the real bottleneck was the constant review and revisions, the ever-fluctuating groupmind consensus of the ad-hoc that commissioned their work. View quote
Cory Doctorow
It's important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it's going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right. View quote
Cory Doctorow
I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that deadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there is no real victory. View quote
Cory Doctorow
The universe gets older. So do I. View quote
Cory Doctorow
Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the "good guys" are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. View quote
Cory Doctorow
Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It's your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade. View quote
Cory Doctorow
I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily. View quote
Cory Doctorow
The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot. View quote
Cory Doctorow
It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy. (Cory Doctorow)
As someone once said, "Just because you're not interested in politics does not mean that politics won't be interested in you." And staying away from politics either because you think tech will make laws irrelevant or because there's no good way to influence laws just opens the field for people who don't cherish either of those illusions to make things very bad indeed. View quote
Cory Doctorow
But she was one of those doctors who hadn't gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in. View quote
Cory Doctorow
And don't talk to me about having a positive attitude. The reason all those who've died of cancer croaked is because they had cancer, not because they were too gloomy. View quote
Cory Doctorow
Greg, what are you talking about? Ending corruption? Like there's a version of this society that isn't corrupt? Corruption isn't the exception, it's the norm. It's baked in. The whole idea of using markets to figure out who gets what is predicated on corruption-it's a way to paper over the fact that some people get a lot, most of us get not much, and so we invent a deus ex machina called market forces that hands out money based on merit. How do we know that the market is giving it to deserving people? Well, look at all the money they have! It's just circular reasoning. View quote
Cory Doctorow