Quotes by Paul Farmer

So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

— Paul Farmer

Life

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

Wisdom

But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

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.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

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

Life

If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it's usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housing, or just bad housing.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

I mean, everybody should have access to medical care. And, you know, it shouldn't be such a big deal.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.

— Paul Farmer

Life

I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

I can't think of a better model for Haiti rebuilding than Rwanda.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

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.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

But as for activism, my parents did what they could, given the constraints, but were never involved in the causes I think of when I think of activists.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom

The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.

— Paul Farmer

Life

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

— Paul Farmer

Success

Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.

— Paul Farmer

Life

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

Success

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

Wisdom

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

— Paul Farmer

Wisdom