The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.