Ivan Illich Quotes

60 quotes in 1032 categories

• It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special…
• Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
• Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.
• Leadership does not depend on being right.
• To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.
• Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret;…
• The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
• What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?
• Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the…
• We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught…
• 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…
• 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…
• Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place…
• In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems…
• I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death
• The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

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