181 Quotes by Tracy Kidder

On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.

If you’ve got a Mexican last name, you’ve got a strike against you.

One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, “Computers are irrelevant.” Building.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

To an outsider, building a school before there was a medical clinic, or someone to deal with the problems of hunger and homelessness, was illogical, but Farmer and Lafontant understood that the school meant hope and empowerment.

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

When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal system. Veres says that what he does at home is different enough from what he does at work to serve as recreation for him. At work he deals with hardware; when he’s at home, he focuses on software – reading programming manuals and creating new software for his own computer.

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.

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.