Best Quotes by Tracy Kidder (Top 10)

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all
  4. 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.
  5. That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
  6. 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.
  7. Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.
  8. ...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.
  9. 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.
  10. Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

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