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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 the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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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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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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 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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
Ivan Illich
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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 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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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
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School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.
Ivan Illich