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

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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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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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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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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 public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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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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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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