A Quote by Atul Gawande

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
A book came out recently written by scientists and environmentalists that made me so angry. It said the only thing we have to worry about is big industry. Each individual who tries to make his or her own environment better is useless. I find this criminal, because then you have a billion people all saying, It doesn't matter what I do because I'm just one person. But if you turn that around and a billion people say, What I do does make a difference, then it will make a difference.
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires.
I think the way you dress is a direct reflection out of what you will get out of your day; you make the effort, people will notice. You'll feel better, and those around you will feel better.
My album Pain Medicine might not make all of America feel better, but for single mothers and women who have been hurt as well as women who seek personal life fulfillment it will make them feel as if they have someone they can relate too. The obstacles and issues that I have gone through in my life are more then one could imagine so if I can make it they can also make it through anything.
Most of us make an effort to do and be the best we can be, which leads to a distinction we need to make between the notion of struggle and the notion of effort.
It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.
The notion that only those who preach the gospel of integrated medicine are able to perform the art of medicine is as ridiculous as it is insulting to everyone in healthcare who does his/her best to meet the needs of their patients. The assumption that unproven or disproven treatments become acceptable simply because they are often administered in a kind and caring fashion is quite simply not true.
Medicine allows people to live who would otherwise die, so antibiotics will let people survive infections that they might be otherwise very vulnerable to and even little things might make a big difference, so I wear eyeglasses because my eyes aren't particularly strong, before there were eyeglasses someone at my age would probably not be good for much.
In the Sixties, the hippies said "Make love, not war," and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say "Make music, not war," in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons.
...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.
Very often pessimistic people speak against their own desire. They want to undertake some work, and they say, 'I will do this, but I don't think I shall succeed in it.' Thus they hinder themselves in their path. Man does not know that every thought makes an impression on the consciousness and on the rhythm with which the consciousness is working. According to that rhythm that reflection will come true and happen; and a man proves to be his own enemy by his ignorance of these things.
The purpose of life is to help others, and if you can't help them, won't you at least not hurt them? I know that is a platitude, that that is sentimental and can easily be attacked. But loving, caring is simple, and we make it complex. Our own neuroses make it complex.
The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will.
In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money.
The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods.
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