Quotes By Paul Farmer

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.

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.

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

One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.

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've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.