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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
Makes
Interpreting
Tolerable
Intolerable
Perceived
Necessity
Suffering
Pain
Culture
Curable

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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 depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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 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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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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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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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
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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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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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