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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich

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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

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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
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
Ivan Illich
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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
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
Ivan Illich
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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
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
Ivan Illich
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Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.
Ivan Illich
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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
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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
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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
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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
Ivan Illich
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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
Ivan Illich
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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
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Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
Ivan Illich
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
Ivan Illich
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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
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School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
Ivan Illich
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We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.
Ivan Illich