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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.

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
People
Alive
Helping
Feel
Feels

More quotes by 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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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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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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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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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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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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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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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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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The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
Paul Farmer
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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
Paul Farmer
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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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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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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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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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.
Paul Farmer
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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