“That’s true,” Farmer said.

Farmer, 58, made the comments Wednesday at Montana State University after meeting with a group of 60 students and before an evening lecture before a sold-out crowd of 1,400.

MSU President Waded Cruzado planned to award MSU’s Presidential Medal for Global and Visionary Leadership to the doctor.

Thirty years ago, Farmer and friends founded the nonprofit Partners in Health in Haiti. It grew from a few idealists – who believe health care is a human right — into a worldwide leader in bringing health care to the poor and developing practical ways to fight modern plagues like AIDS and multi-drug-resistant TB.

Farmer was profiled in the 2003 bestseller “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. Harvard honored Farmer by naming him a University Professor and chair of its Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1993 with $220,000, which he put toward a health and social justice institute.

Elizabeth Vinson, an MSU senior in physics and student associate with the Leadership Institute, which brought Farmer to MSU, welcomed him before the group of 60 students, saying the campus was lucky to meet “this revolutionary force” in health care.

Asked by students what had sparked his life’s work, Farmer said it all started in college.

He’d grown up living in a trailer park and landed a scholarship to Duke University. There he took any class with “medical” in the title, from ethics to anatomy to anthropology. He did a research project on how race and class affected patients at Duke’s emergency room. He won acceptance into Harvard Medical School.

After college, he went to Haiti and worked at a dilapidated health clinic run by an Episcopal priest.

In his 20s, he returned to Haiti and started a free clinic, worked endless days, made house calls, fought poverty and the lack of basic supplies, money, electricity. He said he hoped it was his American “can-do spirit,” rather than egotism, that made him think he could make a difference.

“It’s Haiti — that set everything in stone for me,” Farmer said. “The idea that really grabbed me was ‘a preferential option for the poor.’ I love everybody, but I love them more.”

What Farmer found most frustrating over the years was the attitude that such obstacles were too much to overcome.

“Anytime you hear somebody say, ‘You’re trying to do too much’ or ‘You’re trying to move too fast’” or “’It’s not sustainable,’” he told students, you should never listen, because it’s the poor who will suffer and die.

Farmer was critical of France, England, Spain and other nations that ran “rapacious empires” for centuries, extracting resources from places like Africa and Haiti, and then after World War II, while still trying to hang onto their colonies, recharacterized themselves as the “Western democracies.” Third World countries still suffer from the legacy of colonialism, he said, so Westerners who go and try to help would be wise to have some humility.

Partners in Health relies on donations from ordinary people, largely in America, he said. “If Americans didn’t care about sharing, Partners in Health wouldn’t be in 10 countries. I’m proud of that.”

He’s also excited to see the changes in Haiti. Since the 2010 earthquake that killed more than a quarter million people, he said, Partners in Health has built a modern teaching hospital at Mirebalais, with six beautiful operating rooms. It’s run mainly by Haitians.

“I love Haiti,” Farmer said. “I like seeing the changes there.

“The thing that excites me most, and why I’m here, is how many young people are excited about global health. … American students are fantastic. That’s the most uplifting thing for me.

“I’m putting my stock in universities and young people.”