Quotes from Paul Farmer

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

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

If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?

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.

lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.

The model of the teaching hospital, which links research to teaching and service is what's missing in global health.

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you look just at the decades after 1934, you know it's hard to point to really inspired and positive support from outside of Haiti, to Haiti, and much easier to point to either small-minded or downright mean-spirited policies.

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.

Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.

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.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

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

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.

If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.

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

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

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.

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.

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.