Paul Farmer (1959–2022) was an American physician and anthropologist known for his pioneering work in global health and social justice. Co-founder of Partners In Health (PIH), Farmer dedicated his career to providing healthcare to the world’s poorest communities. Born in Massachusetts, Farmer earned degrees from Harvard University and the University of Haiti.

Throughout his career, Farmer emphasized the importance of addressing the social determinants of health and advocating for universal access to healthcare. He believed in providing comprehensive, community-based care to marginalized populations, often in resource-limited settings.

Farmer’s work had a transformative impact on global health policy, particularly in the areas of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and maternal and child health. His commitment to social justice and health equity earned him numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

Even after his passing, Farmer’s legacy continues to inspire countless individuals and organizations working towards a more equitable and just world.

Paul Farmer Quotes

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

2. “The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.”
— Paul Farmer

3. “If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?”
— Paul Farmer

4. “Equity is the only acceptable goal.”
— Paul Farmer

5. “The model of the teaching hospital, which links research to teaching and service is what’s missing in global health.”
— Paul Farmer

6. “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

7. “I mean, everybody should have access to medical care. And, you know, it shouldn’t be such a big deal.”
— Paul Farmer

8. “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

9. “60% of workers surveyed said if their employer took action to support the mental wellbeing of all staff, they would feel more loyal, motivated, committed and be likely to recommend their workplace as a good place to work.”
— Paul Farmer

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

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

14. “That’s when I feel most alive, when I’m helping people.”
— Paul Farmer

15. “The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they’re major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.”
— Paul Farmer

16. “I’m not an austere person.”
— Paul Farmer

17. “What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.”
— Paul Farmer

18. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

19. “The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically.”
— Paul Farmer

20. “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

21. “If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.”
— Paul Farmer

22. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

23. “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.”
— Paul Farmer

24. “The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.”
— Paul Farmer

25. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

26. “In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity.”
— Paul Farmer

27. “I’m one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.”
— Paul Farmer

28. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

29. “I critique market-based medicine not because I haven’t seen its heights but because I’ve seen its depths.”
— Paul Farmer

30. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

31. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

32. “We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, ‘What would make this service better for you?’ As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.”
— Paul Farmer

33. “I can’t sleep. There’s always somebody not getting treatment. I can’t stand that.”
— Paul Farmer

34. “The idea that because you’re born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you’re born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.”
— Paul Farmer

35. “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

36. “Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn’t have them anywhere else.”
— Paul Farmer

37. “The thing about rights is that in the end you can’t prove what should be considered a right.”
— Paul Farmer

38. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

39. “Since I do not believe that there should be different recommendations for people living in the Bronx and people living in Manhattan, I am uncomfortable making different recommendations for my patients in Boston and in Haiti.”
— Paul Farmer

40. “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

41. “I think, sometimes, that I’m going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.”
— Paul Farmer

42. “Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.”
— Paul Farmer

43. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

44. “Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.”
— Paul Farmer

45. “We’ve taken on the major health problems of the poorest – tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria – in four countries. We’ve scored some victories in the sense that we’ve cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.”
— Paul Farmer

46. “I feel it’s part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.”
— Paul Farmer

47. “Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.”
— Paul Farmer

48. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

49. “Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.”
— Paul Farmer

50. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

51. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

52. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

53. “I think that looking forward it’s easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.”
— Paul Farmer

54. “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.”
— Paul Farmer

55. “I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.”
— Paul Farmer

56. “If you look just at the decades after 1934, you know it’s hard to point to really inspired and positive support from outside of Haiti, to Haiti, and much easier to point to either small-minded or downright mean-spirited policies.”
— Paul Farmer

57. “I can’t think of a better model for Haiti rebuilding than Rwanda.”
— Paul Farmer

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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