Ivan Illich Quotes

60 quotes in 1032 categories

• The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
• 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…
• Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the…
• There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
• The USDHEW calculates that 7% of all patients suffer compensable injuries while hospitalized .....One out of every five patients admitted to a typical research hospital…
• If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
• The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.
• The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
• 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…
• The medicalization of early diagnosis not only hampers and discourages preventative health-care but it also trains the patient-to-be to function in the meantime as an…
• 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…
• Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
• The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
• Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally…
• I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle…
• A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its…
• Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically…
• To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
• 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…
• We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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