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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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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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.
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
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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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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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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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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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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 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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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Paul Farmer
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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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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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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I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
Paul Farmer