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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the absurdity of neglecting basic needs and services for vulnerable populations.
In this quote, Paul Farmer expresses his frustration with societal indifference towards pressing global issues such as access to clean water, education for children, and healthcare. He highlights the irrationality of allowing such injustices to persist, implying that neglecting these essential services is a form of lunacy, and he challenges the reader to confront the reality of these injustices and the moral implications of inaction.
In practice
In a speech addressing humanitarian aid, one might say, 'As Paul Farmer pointed out, neglecting basic needs for the vulnerable is a form of lunacy.'
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
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
I am an atheist, thanks be to God.
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
I tell you what's really ridiculous--going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
You know the theory of cell irritability? If you take an amoeba cell and poke it a thousand times, it will change and then re-form into its original shape. And then, the thousandth time you poke this amoeba, the cell will completely collapse and become nothing. That's kind of what it's like being famous. People say hi, how are you doing, and after the thousandth time, you just get angry; you really pop.
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