15 of Fred's most inspiring quotes
Fred Hollows got things done. He believed humans were innately good, and in the potential for a better world. Fred was also fearless and outspoken - and much of what he said fired people up and made them take action.
Here's an insight in to this great man's mind - and perhaps some inspiration that we all have the power to make a difference.
1. "Every eye is an eye. When you are doing surgery there, that is just as important as if you were doing eye surgery on the Prime Minister or King."
2. "I’m an optimist, always, that the world can be a better place."
3. "I believe the basic attribute of mankind is to look after one another."
4. "We discover our own humanity when we help others."
5. "Good honest work. How many people have the opportunity to be a part of that? To watch that sort of good surgery being done on cataract-blind people warms your soul."
6. "It’s obscene to let people go blind when they don’t have to."
7. "Just as the quality of humaneness comes from having a concern for…people less fortunate, so too does the humanity of a country, which will be determined by the extent to which it helps countries less fortunate than itself."
8. "I’ve never been anyone’s idea of the smooth doctor type."
9. "I might be a do-gooder but, if doing good is preventing people going blind and curing curable blindness, I don’t care what they call me."
10. "I dream of the time when the disparity between the First and the Third World will be much, much less than it is now. Because that’s the great running sore that humans have to deal with."
11. "Some countries still send teams of surgeons….to Third World countries to do surgery on the poor and we’re opposed to that – that’s old-style missionary stuff."
12. "If you don’t want to serve, don’t do medicine. Because the whole tradition of medicine is going to the sick and tending to the sick. There’s no good being a smart doctor if you’re all the time out on your kiwi fruit farm outside Te Puke or wherever they grow kiwi fruit these days.
And that’s one of the great drags of medicine. You have to get up in the middle of the night, you have to tend to the sick when they’re sick. Not when it happens to be convenient to you."
13. "Good eye service is the right of everybody, not just the wealthy who can afford it."
14. "If I think a thing has a chance of working, if I think it’s good, I’m prepared to do it, there and then."
15. "The work was magic... And we were just doing good honest stuff that hadn't been done, and there was a mile of it to be done...We never halted our forward progress to turn around and haggle with the ankle biting dogs snapping at our heels."
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