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

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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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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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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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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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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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 household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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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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