181 Quotes by Tracy Kidder

As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.

In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.

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.

Everything is quantified,” he said. “Whether it’s the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions.

Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.

I stared at the faces of the dead students. “You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus.” “Exactly!” said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. “And neither could the killers!” “The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,” whispered Zacharie. “So they ask. Because they can’t tell. We are the same people.

Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.

We can spend sixty-eight thousand dollars per TB patient in New York City, but if you start giving watches or radios to patients here, suddenly the international health community jumps on you for creating nonsustainable projects.

Farmer would say, “Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have a birthrights.