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

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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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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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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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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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 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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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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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