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

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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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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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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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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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 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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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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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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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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