top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Rights quotes
"Your right in a civilized society is to have freedom."
"Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum."
"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."
"It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights."
"People that have a police car behind them pulling them over should put on their hazard lights and continue slowly driving to the nearest densely populated public place, such as a supermarket or shopping center. Pull over outside the busy entrance and start your video camera. Inform the police officer that you are video recording and very slowly give the requested documentation. Exercise your legal right to silence while the many independent witnesses video record the unexpected stop that rudely interrupts your day. If you are given a ticket, choose to go to court. It will give you time to obtain independent legal advice about the allegation."
Explore more quotes by Paul Farmer
"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."
"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."
"At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease."
"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."
"So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable."
"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."
"I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality."
"For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act."
"I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully."
"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."
bottom of page