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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Without
Sector
Health
Public
Education
Working

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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Equity is the only acceptable goal
Paul Farmer
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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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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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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
Paul Farmer
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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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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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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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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered 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