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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Kids
Decade
Bus
Boat
Decades
Six
Eight
Lived
Either

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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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.
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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.
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
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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.
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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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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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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 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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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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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.
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
Paul Farmer