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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

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
Think
Comfortably
Thinking
Send
World
Miserable
Places
Full
Living
Money
Way

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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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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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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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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 thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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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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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 working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
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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.
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
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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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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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 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 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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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've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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