Quote

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ivan Illich
Age: 76 †
Born: 1926
Born: September 4
Died: 2002
Died: December 2
Anthropologist
Catholic Priest
Historian
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Ivan D. Illich
Ivan Dominic Illich
Surprised
Moment
Hope
Death
Moments

More quotes by Ivan Illich

Image
The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
Ivan Illich
Image
Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
Image
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being with it, yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Ivan Illich
Image
Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
Image
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
Ivan Illich
Image
The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
Ivan Illich
Image
The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
Ivan Illich
Image
The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.
Ivan Illich
Image
The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
Ivan Illich
Image
Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves they demand to be managed.
Ivan Illich
Image
The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health.
Ivan Illich
Image
The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
Ivan Illich
Image
The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
Ivan Illich
Image
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
Image
People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
Ivan Illich
Image
School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Ivan Illich
Image
Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
Image
I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.
Ivan Illich
Image
It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
Image
I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships.
Ivan Illich