Quote

Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.

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
Must
Things
Men
Choose
Rich
Whether
Freedom
Use

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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.
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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.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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.
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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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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.
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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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.
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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.
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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 pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
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.
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