Top 140 Tracy Kidder Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I want a UI that is so simple that drunks can use it and ADDs won’t be distracted away.”

— Tracy Kidder

102. “Infections and Inequalities.”

— Tracy Kidder

103. “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 of breathing. But.”

— Tracy Kidder

104. “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

105. “Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.”

— Tracy Kidder

106. “Part of the fascination,” he said, “is just little boys who never grew up, playing with Erector sets. Engineers just don’t lose that, and if you do lose it, you just can’t be an engineer anymore.”

— Tracy Kidder

107. “Danger made life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while.”

— Tracy Kidder

108. “He opened all the drawers in his desk. All were empty, except that a box of staples lay in one. He pocketed the staples. “I already took the polygraph.”

— Tracy Kidder

109. “En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he’d been a hobo from ‘37 to ‘39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. “Killers,” he called them. And said it again, “Killers.”

— Tracy Kidder

110. “At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The.”

— Tracy Kidder

111. “Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.”

— Tracy Kidder

112. “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.”

— Tracy Kidder

113. “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 preoccupied, that for them omens often don’t exist.”

— Tracy Kidder

114. “Listening to the man’s story, Jim felt he’d been granted a privilege. This was intimate contact with life, the very thing he had missed during all those years of reading philosophy.”

— Tracy Kidder

115. “Money is a fictional thing that is supposed to go around. Hoarding it is a sin.”

— Tracy Kidder

116. “Most of the patients I’ve been close to over these thirty-two years are dead. So there’s a certain sadness and moral outrage that I can’t get rid of. But when you work with people who’ve had so little chance in life, there’s a lot you can do. You try to take care of people, meet them where they are, figure out who they are, figure out what they need, how you can ease their suffering. I was drafted into this job, I didn’t pick it, but I lucked into the best job I can imagine.”

— Tracy Kidder

117. “If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility.”

— Tracy Kidder

118. “West once said, “An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.”

— Tracy Kidder

119. “Look, I don’t have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.”

— Tracy Kidder

120. “Certain of the engineers now entered what West called “the first off-the-wall period.” A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure, in which you travel by computer into an underground world, wandering through strange, awful labyrinths, searching for treasure that’s guarded and sometimes snatched away by dragons, dwarfs, trolls and a rapacious pirate who mutters: “Har. Har.”

— Tracy Kidder

121. “IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.”

— Tracy Kidder

122. “In America, lengths of hospital stays had greatly diminished. Patients were sent home to recuperate after procedures that once would have meant a week or more in a hospital bed. But for people without homes this change meant recuperating in the shelters or on the streets.”

— Tracy Kidder

123. “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 understand how things get put together. Even if you can’t under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together.”

— Tracy Kidder

124. “He had a mind for the age that was coming. He stood on the right rung of the evolutionary ladder.”

— Tracy Kidder

125. “Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies split the differences more or less; they sold some machines and service to actual users, but spent most of their money on hardware and did a big business by selling machines in quantity to OEMs.”

— Tracy Kidder

126. “Among the losses he regretted was the pint bottle of whiskey he once carried for the times when a patient was in alcohol withdrawal and on the verge of seizure. “You couldn’t do that now. It’s become a moral issue.”

— Tracy Kidder

127. “Nothing every happens unless you push it. Ed Rasala. 111.”

— Tracy Kidder

128. “Maybe this is true more generally, a magnification of a common problem: If we knew everything that everyone had said and done, we might not enjoy anyone’s company.”

— Tracy Kidder

129. “Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, “What they call tough auditing, we call thievery.”

— Tracy Kidder

130. “Farmer told me that he found his life’s work not in books or in theories but mainly through experiencing Haiti. “I would read stuff from scholarly texts and know they were wrong. Living in Haiti, I realized that a minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have an enormous impact on the poor in another.”

— Tracy Kidder

131. “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. They don’t know we’re crazy.”

— Tracy Kidder

132. “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 asphyxiate on its own success.”

— Tracy Kidder

133. “We’re making up for what wasn’t done for our patients. What you didn’t provide – schools, jobs, safety.” In truth, though, over the first ten years he and his colleagues rarely had occasion to question the worthiness of what they were doing, simply because they were so busy doing it.”

— Tracy Kidder

134. “Giving people medicine for TB and not giving them food is like washing your hands and drying them in the dirt.”

— Tracy Kidder

135. “Jim was sometimes asked what single thing he’d do to end homelessness. On one of those occasions, he cited large population studies about the tight connection between health and educational status. If he had the power, he said, he’d pay public school teachers $200,000 a year and maybe thirty years later homelessness would become a rarity. Maybe what he called “the faucet” would be turned off. More often, he spoke of a more general solution – “What we need is a new war on poverty.”

— Tracy Kidder

136. “There are more billionaires today than ever before,” Jim declared. “We are talking about wealth that we’ve never seen before. And the only time that I hear talk of shrinking resources among people like us, among academics, is when we talk about things that have to do with poor people.”

— Tracy Kidder

137. “You did not have to be the first company to produce the new kind of machine; sometimes, in fact, it was better not to be the first. But you had to produce yours before the new market really opened up and customers had made other marriages. For once they are lost, both old and prospective customers are often gone for good.”

— Tracy Kidder

138. “Reagan administration had used a study of mental health problems among homeless mothers to argue against housing subsidies – to say in effect that families were homeless because of mental illness, not a lack of housing.”

— Tracy Kidder

139. “Charity is scraps from the table, social justice is a seat at the table, and remember, we want a seat.”

— Tracy Kidder

140. “Some notion of how shrewd they could be is perhaps revealed in the fact that they never tried to hoard a majority of the stock, but used it instead as a tool for growth. Many young entrepreneurs, confusing ownership with control, can’t bring themselves to do this.”

— Tracy Kidder

141. “Beginnings are an exercise in limits.”

— Tracy Kidder