Paul Farmer QUOTES

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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " Writing: When Rock Around the Clock was shown in the cinemas in 1956, teenagers got so excited by the music that there was dancing in the aisles. Imagine that you are a newspaper reporter who has just been to see the film. Write your 'story' for tomorrow's paper. "

― Paul Farmer

10 " 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. 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

11 " 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

12 " The United States granted asylum to exactly eight of 24,559 Haitian refugees applying for political asylum during that period [1981]... only 20 percent of those polled [in the US] said immigration should be easier for Haitians, while 55 percent said it should be more difficult. After a decade during which less than 0.5 percent of Haitian applicants were granted asylum, one wonders how much more difficult it could be. "

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

13 " It was not until 1986 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to draft laws requiring immigrants to be tested for and found free of HIV. This legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Senator Jesse Helms and was approved - unanimously - in June 1987. "This Senate action was extraordinary," notes a legal opinion, "in that it assumed a responsibility, previously entrusted to the HHS, to determine which communicable diseases would be grounds for excluding aliens. "

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

14 " While these racial differentials in mortality have provoked a certain amount of discussion, public health expert Vicente Navarro recently pointed to the "deafening silence" on the topic of class differentials in mortality in the United States, where "race is used as a substitute for class." But in 1986, on "one of the few occasions that the U.S. government collected information on mortality rates (for heart and cerebrovascular disease) by class, the results showed that, by whatever indicators of class one might choose (level of education, income, or occupation), morality rates are related to social class. "

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

15 " All these aspects which make up the overall picture of the state of humanity in the late twentieth century have one common name: oppression. They all, including the hunger suffered by millions of human beings, result from the oppression of some human beings by others. The impotence of international bodies in the face of generally recognized problems, their inability to effect solutions, stems from the self-interest of those who stand to benefit from their oppression of other human beings. In each major problem there is broad recognition of both the moral intolerableness and the political non-viability of the existing situation, coupled with a lack of capacity to respond.

If the problem is (or the problems are) a conflict of interests, then the energy to find the solution can come only from the oppressed themselves. "

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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " Since Guantanamo is not technically on U.S. soil, the Bush administration lawyers developed a torturous rationale:
'While conceding that the Haitians are treated differently from other national groups who seek asylum in the U.S., the Government claimed that the U.S. Constitution and other sources of U.S. and international law do not apply to Guantanamo - this despite the fact that the U.S. military base at Guantanamo is under the exclusive jurisdiction and control of the U.S. Government. "

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

19 " Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, those who die 'natural' deaths of 'natural causes' like measles, whooping cough, breakbone fever, cholera, typhoid, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria, and other lovely gastrointestinal and lung diseases? Our dead, the majority dead, the democratically dead, dying from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, without anyone even counting them, without anyone saying "ENOUGH!" which would have at least given some meaning to their deaths, a meaning which no one ever sought for them, the forever dead, who are now dying again, but this time in order to live." - Zapatistas on being offered a pardon in exchange for their surrender "

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

20 " 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

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