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
Men
Choose
Rich
Whether
Freedom
Use
Must
Things

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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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.
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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.
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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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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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.
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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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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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