Tracy Kidder > Quotes

“... "You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.”
― Tracy Kidder, Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

“among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“Paul's face grew serious. 'I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich [...] I'm very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I'm American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that's called privilege, not democracy.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder

“Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I'm not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don't dislike victory. ... You know, people from our background-like you, like most PIH-ers, like me-we're used to being on a victory team, and actually what we're really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it's not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“Little sleep, no investment portfolio, no family around, no hot water. On an evening a few days after arriving in Cange, I wondered aloud what compensation he got for these various hardships. He told me, “If you’re making sacrifices, unless you’re automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don’t have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence.” He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn’t bristle, but his tone had an edge: “I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma.” This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer’s”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“If disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure 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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength In What Remains

“In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“[Farmer] went to dozens of American and Canadian universities and colleges, preaching his O for the P [Preferential Option for the Poor] gospel, and to South Africa, where he debated a World Bank official at an international AIDS conference. "Africans must learn to curb their sexual appetites," the banker remarked, and Farmer replied, "I want to talk about other bankers, not the World Bankers, but bankers in general. My suspicion is they're not getting a lot of sex, because they spend a lot of time screwing the poor.”
― Tracy Kidder

“It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing;”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

“some years later, that he had “faith,” then add, “I also have faith in penicillin, rifampin, isoniazid, and the good absorption of the fluoroquinolones, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true, too. So if I had to choose between lib theo, or any ology, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don’t have to make that choice, do I?”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

“Just give love,” it read in part. “The soul will take that love / and put it where it can best be used.”
― Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers

“One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.”
― Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, "I have learned never to say, 'Never again.”
― Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

“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.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine