123 Quotes by Paul Farmer

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

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.

There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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