Quote

The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

Paul Farmer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Considered
Prove
Rights
Ends
Right
Thing

More quotes by Paul Farmer

Image
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
Image
It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
Paul Farmer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
Paul Farmer
Image
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.
Paul Farmer
Image
I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Paul Farmer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
Paul Farmer
Image
Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
Paul Farmer
Image
Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
Paul Farmer
Image
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
Image
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.
Paul Farmer
Image
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
Image
What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
Paul Farmer
Image
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
Image
The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
Paul Farmer
Image
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