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Book: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
Quotes of Book: Mountains Beyond Mountains:
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  1. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    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.
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  2. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    ...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.
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  3. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    Paul's face grew serious. 'I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as {a Russian doctor}, I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich {...} I'm very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I'm American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that's called privilege, not democracy.
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  4. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.
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  5. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all
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  6. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    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."
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  7. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    central imperative of liberation theology-to provide a preferential option for the poor-seemed like a worthy life's goal to him. Of course, one could pursue it almost anywhere, but clearly the doctrine implied making choices among degrees of poverty. It would make sense to provide medicine in the places that needed it most, and there was no place needier than Haiti, at least in the Western Hemisphere, and he hadn't seen any place in Haiti needier than Cange. He didn't stick around in Léogâne to see the blood bank get installed. He'd found out that the hospital would charge patients for its use. He told me he had these thoughts, as he headed back toward the central plateau: "I'm going to build my own fucking hospital. And there'll be none of that there, thank you.
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  8. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    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 even omniscient, was keeping score.
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  9. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    The central belief of liberation theology - to provide a preferential option for the poor...providing medicine in the places that needed it the most...
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  10. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    Virchow would write, 'My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.' He had a knack for aphorism. 'Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.' '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 to make 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.' This last was Farmer's favorite. Virchow put the world together in a way that made sense to Farmer. 'Virchow had a comprehensive vision,' he said. 'Pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology. My model."
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  11. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    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.
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  12. Tracy Kidder _ Mountains Beyond Mountains:

    How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer's case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything he does, including the hike to Casse.
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