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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

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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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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 State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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 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 must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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.
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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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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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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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