Quote

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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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
Something
Tasks
Believe
Careful
Tasteful
Life
Remain
Disciplined
Like
Friendship
Denying
World
Therefore
Friendships
Technology
Cultivate
Political
Task
Self
Begins

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
Ivan Illich
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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.
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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Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.
Ivan Illich
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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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The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
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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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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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich