I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of addressing and highlighting the issues faced by the poor.
In this quote, Paul Farmer expresses his belief that it is not only important but also a duty to bring attention to the struggles of impoverished individuals. By making their problems compelling, he seeks to encourage others to engage with these issues and consider solutions that promote social justice and equity, thereby fostering a greater sense of responsibility within society.
In practice
In a speech about social responsibility at a charity event.
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 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
It becomes still more difficult to findβ¨Words at once true and kind,β¨Or not untrue and not unkind.
Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness.
I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.
I'm not much but I'm all I have.
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