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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.

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
Depends
Ideologies
Technology
Consumerism
Support
Technologies
Choices
Spontaneous
Upon
Ideology
Future
Developing
Action
Institutions
Life
Choice

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves they demand to be managed.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
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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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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
Ivan Illich
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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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