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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Hungry
Material
Materials
Spiritual
Else
Someone
Problem

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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.
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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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 impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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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
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
Paul Farmer