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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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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
Perceived
Necessity
Suffering
Pain
Culture
Curable
Makes
Interpreting
Tolerable
Intolerable

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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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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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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 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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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 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 new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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 State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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