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"The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right."
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Exlpore more Human Rights quotes
"The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view."
"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America."
"Those who deny any group of people human rights are really denying the humanity of that group - and their own."
"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."
"Terror doesn't change people from gay to straight. It just hurts innocent people."
"Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx."
"The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right."
Explore more quotes by Paul Farmer
"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."
"I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim."
"I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory."
"The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view."
"I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths."
"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."
"The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame."
"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."
"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."
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