Quotes from Paul Farmer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

WL's [White Liberals] think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that. There's a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It's what separates us from roaches

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

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.

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

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

Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm

with rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others—or, in a word, partnership.

Haiti was founderd by a righteous revolution in 1804 and became the first black republic. It was the first country to break the chains of slavery, the first to force Emperor Napoleon to retreat, and the only to aid Simón Bolívar in his struggle to liberate the indigenous people and slaves of Latin America from their colonial oppressors.

a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

I said, "Nég Mawon toujou kanpé!!" —the free man is still standing!! And she replied, powerfully. "Cheri, Nég Mawon p'ap jamn krazé" —my dear, the free man will never be broken.

Laws are not science; they are normative ideology and are thus tightly tied to power. Biomedicine and public health, though also vulnerable to being deformed by ideology, serve different imperatives, ask different questions. They do not ask whether an event or a process violates an existing rule; they ask whether that event or process has ill effects on a patient or a population.

the basis of our preferential option for the poor to say: I accompany them not because they are all good, or because I am all good, but because God is good.

It is with this surety that we must stand with Haiti, a country whose spirit and people will never be broken, and work in solidarity toward the future the Haitian people deserve.

Human rights violations are nit accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.

The current human rights movement in Africa - with the possible exception of the women's rights movement and faith-based social justice initiatives - appears almost by design to exclude the participation of the people whose welfare it purports to advance.' - Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm. If assaults on dignity are anything but random in distribution or course, whose interests are served by the suggestion that they are haphazard?

As Phillipe Bourgois notes, paraphrasing a warning issued by Laura Nader years ago: "Don't study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them." I hope to have avoided lurid recountings that serve little other purpose than to show, as anthropologists love to do, that I was there.