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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
Else
Someone
Problem
Hungry
Material
Materials
Spiritual

More quotes by 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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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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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 idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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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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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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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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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.
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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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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 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
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
Paul Farmer
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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
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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
Paul Farmer