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All Paul Farmer Quotes
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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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
Paul Farmer
56% of people like this quote
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
55% of people like this quote
I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Paul Farmer
55% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.
Paul Farmer
52% of people like this quote
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
52% of people like this quote
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
52% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths.
Paul Farmer
50% of people like this quote
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