Paul Farmer Quotes

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Humanity

  Tags in Wrong, Matter, World

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

• One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Tags in Malaria, Health Problems, Maternal

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

  Paul Farmer

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Right, Prove

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Modern Medicine, Blame

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

  Paul Farmer

  Tags in Human Rights, Med

• 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

  Tags in Broaden, Narrowly

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Treatable, Disease

• 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

  Tags in Recommendations, Haiti

• 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

  Tags in Access, Pharmaceutical

Paul Farmer (37)

Birth:	26th October, 1959
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Anthropologist, Physician

Related Authors

• Joan Halifax
• Ruth Benedict
• Helen Fisher
• William Ury
• Marvin Harris
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Tadao Umesao
• Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
• Gustave Le Bon
• Zora Neale Hurston

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 17th April

Births

• 1806 - William Gilmore Simms
• 1934 - Barry Humphries
• 1880 - Leonard Woolley
• 1937 - Kerry Thornley
• 1985 - Rooney Mara

Deaths

• 1884 - Thomas Gold Appleton
• 2004 - Soundarya
• 1893 - Lucy Larcom
• 2007 - Kitty Carlisle
• 2003 - Robert Atkins