Quote

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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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
Levels
Survive
Modern
Individuals
Making
Lows
Individual
Medicine
True
Population
Inhumanly
Whole
Miracle
Diabolical
Health
Populations
Personal
Consists

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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 new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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.
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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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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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