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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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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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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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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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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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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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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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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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
Paul Farmer