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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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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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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
Ivan Illich
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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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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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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 State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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 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
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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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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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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 depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
Ivan Illich