Paul Farmer Quotes

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Paul Farmer

Profession : Educator

Birth : October 26, 1959

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Farmer

I've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.

Paul Farmer

I'm not an austere person.

Paul Farmer

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

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

Paul Farmer

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

Paul Farmer

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

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

I don't know much about climate change. But I'm pretty sure we better figure out what to do to lessen its impact - at least its health impact - and that's not going to happen unless you have a lot of young talent interested in these topics.

Paul Farmer

What the American public thinks is very important to the future of global health. Many people are moved by the idea that there is unnecessary suffering in the world, and we could do a lot to stop it. We have the technologies necessary to stop most of the suffering.

Paul Farmer

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

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

Paul Farmer

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

Paul Farmer

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

Paul Farmer

Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.

Paul Farmer