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

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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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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.
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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 depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
Ivan Illich
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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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