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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

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
Arguing
Disease
Dies
Treatable
Argue

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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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
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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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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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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
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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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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Equity is the only acceptable goal
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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
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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.
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.
Paul Farmer
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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Paul Farmer