Rachel

“Proponents of science as a foundation for health care have not come together to form a grassroots movement, and until this happens, all of us will have to live with a system based on pseudoscience, greed, myths, lies, fraud, and looking the other way.

Patients need to understand that more care is not better care, that doctors are not necessarily right, and that some doctors are not even truthful.

Genuine health-care reform--like the right to vote--will not be granted magnanimously. Like civil rights, the right to good health care will have to be won in public struggle. To bring about real change, real people will have to say, "Enough!”
― Otis Webb Brawley, How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America

“It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.

There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the questions, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It's up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.

In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's a different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future