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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Catholic
Impact
Theory
Social
Would
Intellectually
Catholicism

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money
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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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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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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.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
Paul Farmer