Top 120 Tracy Kidder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

2. “The only real nation is humanity.”

— Tracy Kidder

3. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

4. “Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.”

— Tracy Kidder

5. “Beyond mountains there are mountains.” – Haitian proverb.”

— Tracy Kidder

6. “EVERY ADULT IS shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence.”

— Tracy Kidder

7. “The ocean doesn’t care about you. It makes your boat feel tiny. The oceans are great promoters of religion, or at least of humility-but not in everyone.”

— Tracy Kidder

8. “Don’t worry about being worried. You’re heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.”

— Tracy Kidder

9. “What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative.”

— Tracy Kidder

10. “When I select a topic, it’s usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.”

— Tracy Kidder

11. “I’ve gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I’m gonna go mad.”

— Tracy Kidder

12. “If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don’t like is bound to happen.”

— Tracy Kidder

13. “When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.”

— Tracy Kidder

14. “People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.”

— Tracy Kidder

15. “Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.”

— Tracy Kidder

16. “The combination of domesticity and wildness – that’s a deep expression.”

— Tracy Kidder

17. “Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.”

— Tracy Kidder

18. “That’s when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I’m helping people.”

— Tracy Kidder

19. “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

— Tracy Kidder

20. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

21. “Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.”

— Tracy Kidder

22. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

23. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

24. “I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich.” I thought he was done, but he was only pausing for the interpreter to catch up. “Look, I’m very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I’m American. I can travel freely throughout the world, I can start projects, but that’s called privilege, not democracy.”

— Tracy Kidder

25. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

26. “If disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.”

— Tracy Kidder

27. “I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.”

— Tracy Kidder

28. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

29. “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.” This last was Farmer’s favorite.”

— Tracy Kidder

30. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

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

— Tracy Kidder

32. “It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.” “Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.” “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”

— Tracy Kidder

33. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

34. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

35. “I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, ‘Well, you are on your own. Maybe I’m tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don’t you look after yourselves?’ And I think He’s been sleeping too much.”

— Tracy Kidder

36. “My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.”

— Tracy Kidder

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

— Tracy Kidder

38. “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 pay us a hell of a lot more than they do.” Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.”

— Tracy Kidder

39. “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.”

— Tracy Kidder

40. “The central belief of liberation theology – to provide a preferential option for the poor... providing medicine in the places that needed it the most...”

— Tracy Kidder

41. “If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.”

— Tracy Kidder

42. “If two smart and logical people disagree it’s because they are acting on different information.”

— Tracy Kidder

43. “When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn’t care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.”

— Tracy Kidder

44. “I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.”

— Tracy Kidder

45. “But he realized that Haiti was now so embedded in his mind and heart that he could never abandon the country so quickly.”

— Tracy Kidder

46. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

47. “Business is an excuse to build a team and product is what the team does. You have to pay salaries so you need to earn a profit.”

— Tracy Kidder

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

— Tracy Kidder

49. “What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I’m interested in how ordinary people live their lives.”

— Tracy Kidder

50. “Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy theory around 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.”

— Tracy Kidder