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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
Use
Must
Things
Men
Choose
Rich
Whether
Freedom

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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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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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 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 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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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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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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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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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
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