Ivan Illich Quotes

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.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

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.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

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 we desire to create.

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

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

Schools teach the need to be taught.

Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.

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.

What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?

I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death

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

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

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.

It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.

The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

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

Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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

The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

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

The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

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

The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.

If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.

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

The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.

To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.

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

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.

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

Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.

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

Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.

P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty

Excessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy the social, cultural, and environmental conditions for equal productive freedom.