Cory Doctorow Quotes

American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.

Hollywood has always been political. They consider it their right and duty to tell us what is politically good and right.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The entertainment industry has an effect on social consciousness.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

I think it may be even a bigger story than the internet. You know, it's like saying, 'how big a deal is the internet?' The Chinese middle-class is going to change the world.

The people in our country and in America and in all West European countries, they have to gorge and guzzle so that they don't even start to think about the fact that we have something to do with Vietnam or what it might be about, OK?

The media nowadays has given the message to adults. Don't try new things, don't look foolish because we will catch you and then broadcast it to the world. I think children don't have that.

There is more to the culture of cruelty than simply ethically challenged policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, particularly children, there is also the emergence of a punishing state, a governing through crime youth complex, and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline as the new face of Jim Crow.

I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short. Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. What we have seen in Baltimore should, indeed I think does, tear at our soul.

The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.

The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we're living, the things that we're dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations.

It's just people who grew up in that time are suddenly old enough to be creators themselves, but I think they have a little perspective. I'm 40 now, and I have children of my own. Before I forget my own childhood completely, I want to take some time to take a look at the '80s and think back.

In my opinion humanity is being prayed upon, I mean as a species. Not only by old satanic families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, Collins, Dupont, Warner, Russell, the world's monarchies, the Vatican. But also prayed upon by these family's employees, by governments, by the military, by banking institutions, by academia. So who does that leave? That's all the people who aren't wealthy, aren't connected, aren't educated, who are easy to manipulate, are easy to persecute and who don't believe any of the issues which you cover on Red Ice. And that's a problem. And that breaks my heart.

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

I think what's happening in Hollywood is a direct reflection of what's happening in the world right now.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

I think whether you've got children or not you're just more aware of others as you get out of your 20s.

The suffering inflicted, and more often than not on the most vulnerable sectors of society, demeans all of us as humanity. That it is invariably women, children, the aged and disabled who suffer in these conflicts stands to the added shame of humankind.

The children of each generation are taught to want what they are taught they must not have.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life.

It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.

How did we get to the point where we're paying for bottled water? That must have been some weird marketing meeting over in France. Some French guy's sitting there, like, "How dumb do I think the Americans are? I bet you we could sell those idiots water."