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

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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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 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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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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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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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 is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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