One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, Computers are irrelevant. Building
In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxia...
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...
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.
The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.
That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
It seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn't seem to be aware of Margaret.
In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased...
In the modern computer, software has developed in such a way as to fill this role of go-between. On one end you have the so-called end user who wants to be able to order up a piece of long division, s...
I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen, West said years later. There’s some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understan...
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 supp...
Farmer liked to tell his Harvard students that to be a good clinician you must never let a patient know that you have problems too, or that you’re in a hurry.
EVERY ADULT IS shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence.
By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.
But he realized that Haiti was now so embedded in his mind and heart that he could never abandon the country so quickly.
As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.
Several talked about their flexible hours. No one keeps track of the hours we work, said Ken Holberger. He grinned. That’s not altruism on Data General’s part. If anybody kept track, they’d have to pa...
People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be. - Paul Farmer