Quotes from Tracy Kidder

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all.

The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation." "Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community." "The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.

I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after yourselves?' And I think He's been sleeping too much.

I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls "ambivalence," the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

Margaret Mead once said, 'Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.' He paused. 'Indeed, they are the only ones who ever have.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

The view reminded of the Haitain proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains" which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next.

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.

If disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing;

Doctors are notorious for taking peculiar views of their own bodies. They tend to develop hypochondria in medical school and, once they get over it, if they do, tend to think they're invulnerable.

So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.

In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.

A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company's engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read.