123 Quotes by Paul Farmer

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.

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.

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.

I think, sometimes, that I’m going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.

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.

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

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

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

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.