Brian > Brian's Quotes

“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, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

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

“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, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Farmer points to what he calls "structural violence," which influences "the nature and distribution of extreme suffering." The book is, as he explains, "a physician-anthropologist's effort to reveal the ways in which the most basic right-the right to survive-is trampled in an age of great affluence." He argues: "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, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor