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.
Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education is a fundamental right that everyone should have access to, regardless of their background.
Paul Farmer emphasizes the importance of ensuring that both primary and secondary education is accessible to all individuals. He highlights the belief that education is not just a privilege for a few, but a fundamental right that can empower individuals and uplift communities. Access to education is vital for personal and societal growth, making it a shared responsibility to advocate for and support educational opportunities for everyone.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech advocating for educational reform, a speaker might quote Paul Farmer to emphasize the need for equitable access to schools.
More from Paul Farmer
All quotes βI 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.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
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.
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.
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
Similar quotes
It has been a privilege to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to see how it might help mankind in more practical ways.
Books can be passed around. They can be shared. A lot of people like seeing them in their houses. They are memories. People who don't understand books don't understand this. They learn from TV shows about organizing that you should get rid of the books that you aren't reading, but everyone who loves books believes the opposite. People who love books keep them around, like photos, to remind them of a great experience and so they can revisit and say, "Wow, this is a really great book."
What we need is a world full of miracles, like the miracle of seeing the young child seeking work and independence, and manifesting a wealth of enthusiasm and love.
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.
Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.