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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Dies
Chance
Idea
Born
Malawi
May
Haiti
Ideas
Hungry
Take
Bed
Children
Child

More quotes by 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.
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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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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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.
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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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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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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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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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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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