Paul Farmer Quotes

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?

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.

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.

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

With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.

What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.

If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.

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.

That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.

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.

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

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.

People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.

I can't sleep. There's always somebody not getting treatment. I can't stand that.

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.

Equity is the only acceptable goal

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

...In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work.

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.

Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.

Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.

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.

The model of the teaching hospital, which links research to teaching and service is what's missing in global health.

I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.

Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.

In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity.

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.

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

I'm not an austere person.

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

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.

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.

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea, ' to quote Gandhi.