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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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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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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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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 future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
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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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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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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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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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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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