IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were ac...
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 fortun...
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.
The little room was a forest of equipment now. A couple of months had passed since Eagle had been cloned. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time m...
The central belief of liberation theology - to provide a preferential option for the poor...providing medicine in the places that needed it the most...
Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.
It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent...
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...
He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccu...
He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, I have learned never to say, 'Never again.
Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that a small group of committed individuals could do it. He liked to say of PIH, People think we’re unrealistic....
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.
The Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps...
A professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls the compulsion to program. He describes the afflicted as bright young men of disheveled appearance, often wit...
Virchow was the perfect role model for anyone who wanted to change the world, or at least lessen the inequality between the rich and poor. One of Farmer’s favorite Virchow quotes was The physicians ar...
Too much protocol.
The view reminded me of the Haitian 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. The vie...
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.