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For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Someone
Area
Even
Clarity
Tools
Areas
Fronts
Front
Eradicate
Moral
Alleviate
Suffering
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More quotes by Paul Farmer

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With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
Paul Farmer
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
Paul Farmer
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You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
Paul Farmer
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
Paul Farmer
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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
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Equity is the only acceptable goal
Paul Farmer
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The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
Paul Farmer
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It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
Paul Farmer
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Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
Paul Farmer
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
Paul Farmer
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The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
Paul Farmer
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I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
Paul Farmer
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The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
Paul Farmer
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You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
Paul Farmer
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Paul Farmer
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
Paul Farmer
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
Paul Farmer
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Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.
Paul Farmer
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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
Paul Farmer
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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
Paul Farmer