Paul Farmer

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.

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.

The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.

The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.

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.

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.

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 working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.

Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.