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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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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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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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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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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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 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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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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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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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