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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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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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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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
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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
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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
Ivan Illich
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
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Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.
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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Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
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 must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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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