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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
Suffering
Disposal
Someone
Area
Even
Clarity
Tools
Areas
Fronts
Front
Eradicate
Moral
Alleviate

More quotes by 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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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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.
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I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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.
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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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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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.
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The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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.
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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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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
Paul Farmer
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At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
Paul Farmer