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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.

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
Work
People
Tools
Rather
Need
Needs

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
Ivan Illich
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
Ivan Illich
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
Ivan Illich
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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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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.
Ivan Illich
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
Ivan Illich
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich