Ivan Illich Short Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.

Ivan Illich
The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.

Ivan Illich
Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.

Ivan Illich
People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.

Ivan Illich
In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized.

Ivan Illich
School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

Ivan Illich
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

Ivan Illich
The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.

Ivan Illich
School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

Ivan Illich
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Ivan Illich
Increasingly people live in an artifact and become artifacts themselves, feel satisfied, feel fit for that artifact insofar as they themselves have been manipulated.

Ivan Illich
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 health.

Ivan Illich
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 in them.

Ivan Illich
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.

Ivan Illich
I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.

Ivan Illich