Paul Farmer > Quotes

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
― Paul Farmer

“It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.”
― Paul Farmer

“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

“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”
― Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

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

“Statistics or graphs,’” are not optimal to understand the ‘experience of suffering.’” (qtd in Sutton 11)”
― Paul Farmer, M.D.

“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.”
― Paul Farmer

“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”
― Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

“If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.”
― Paul Farmer, In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez

“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”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“with rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others—or, in a word, partnership.”
― Paul Farmer, To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake

“a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.”
― Paul Farmer, In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez

“Sure, I said. But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that?
He turned back and , smiling sweetly, said, Fuck you.
Then, in a stentorian voice, he corrected himself: No. I would say, 'The objective is to inculcate in the doctors and nurses the spirit to dedicate themselves to the patients, and especially to having an outcome-oriented view of TB.' He was grinning, his face alight. He looked very young just then. In other words, 'Fuck you'.”
― Paul Farmer & Tracy Kidder

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Farmer points to what he calls "structural violence," which influences "the nature and distribution of extreme suffering." The book is, as he explains, "a physician-anthropologist's effort to reveal the ways in which the most basic right-the right to survive-is trampled in an age of great affluence." He argues: "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.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Do we see [human disparity] as a human predicament--an inescapable result of frailty of our existence? That would be correct had these sufferings been really inescapable, but they are far from that. Preventable diseases can indeed be prevented, curable ailments can certainly be cured, and controllable maladies call out for control. Rather than lamenting the adversity of nature, we have to look for a better comprehension of the social cuases of horror and also of our tolerance of societal abominations.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake

“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.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“But the worst of the expense lies with the medications, and there is no reason for their high and fluctuating prices: the drugs have been off patent for decades, and we know that the same companies sell the same drugs at wildly different prices in different countries. Drug prices should not constitute the chief barrier to effective therapy for all patients... With less complaining, and more coordination, international public health authorities could have brought these prices down rapidly, as we have learned by our efforts to do so.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Statistics no longer frghten us. But pictures of the starving children of Biafra, of Haiti, or of India, with thousands sleeping in the streets, ought to. And this entirely apart from the horrors that befall the poor when they struggle to deliver themselves from their poverty: the tortures, the beheadings, the mothers who someow manage to reach a refuge, but carrying a dead child--a child who could not be nursed in flight and count not be buried after it had died. The catalogue of terrors is endless.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“There is an enormous difference between seeing people as the victims of innate shortcomings and seeing them as the victims of structural violence. Indeed, it is likely that the struggle for rights is undermined whenever the history of unequal chances, and of oppression, is erased or distorted.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“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.”
― Paul Farmer

“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”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“In this increasingly interconnected world, we must understand that what happens to poor people is never divorced from the actions of the powerful. Certainly, people who define themselves as poor may control their own destinies to some extent. But control of lives is related to control of land, systems of production, and the formal political and legal structures in which lives are enmeshed. With time, both wealth and control have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. The opposite trend is desired by those working for social justice.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Certainly, patients may be noncompliant, but how relevant is the notion of compliance in rural Haiti? Doctors may instruct their patients to eat well. But the patients will 'refuse' if they have no food. They may be told to sleep in an open room and away from others, and here again they will be 'noncompliant' if they do not expand and remodel their miserable huts. They may be instructed to go to a hospital. But if hospital care must be paid for in cash, as is the case throughout Haiti, and the patients have no cash, they will be deemed 'grossly negligent'.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“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?”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“By 1995, some 7 percent of all African American adult males were interned [in prison]. As Loic Wacquant has remarked, the state of New York counts more men of color in its prisons than in its public universities. It is important to note that these trends reflect changes in policy rather than changes in behavior.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor