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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.

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
Story
Society
Tell
Stories
Change
Must
Alternative
Alternatives

More quotes by 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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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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School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
Ivan Illich
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
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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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
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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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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
Ivan Illich
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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
Ivan Illich
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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.
Ivan Illich
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
Ivan Illich
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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.
Ivan Illich
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
Ivan Illich
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
Ivan Illich