Top 63 Ivan Illich Quotes
#1. Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
#2. P3- everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling.
Ivan Illich
#3. It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
#4. P8- mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning.
Ivan Illich
#5. The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
Ivan Illich
#6. 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 mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life.
Ivan Illich
#7. P3- modernised poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency
Ivan Illich
#8. Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
Ivan Illich
#9. 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.
Ivan Illich
#10. P4- no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.
Ivan Illich
#11. 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
#12. 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 acolyte to his doctor. He learns to depend on the physician in sickness and in health. He turns into a life-long patient.
Ivan Illich
#13. P7- citizens have learned to think rich and live poor.
Ivan Illich
#14. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
Ivan Illich
#15. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
Ivan Illich
#16. School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.
Ivan Illich
#17. 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 that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.
Ivan Illich
#18. Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a
personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal
as opposed to institutional-service.
Ivan Illich
#19. 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.
Ivan Illich
#20. 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 social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.
Ivan Illich
#21. The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
Ivan Illich
#22. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
#23. Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.
Ivan Illich
#24. The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place
Ivan Illich
#26. If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
Ivan Illich
#27. In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illich
#28. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.
Ivan Illich
#29. At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
Ivan Illich
#30. 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.
Ivan Illich
#31. Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.
Ivan Illich
#32. The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
#33. What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?
Ivan Illich
#34. 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.
Ivan Illich
#35. The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
Ivan Illich
#36. In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized.
Ivan Illich
#37. The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum packages capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescense prior even to satisfaction.
Ivan Illich
#38. 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.
Ivan Illich
#39. 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 my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships.
Ivan Illich
#40. Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.
Ivan Illich
#41. Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
Ivan Illich
#42. 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.
Ivan Illich
#43. To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.
Ivan Illich
#44. Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.
Ivan Illich
#45. The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.
Ivan Illich
#46. People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
Ivan Illich
#47. A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.
Ivan Illich
#48. There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
Ivan Illich
#49. Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
#50. To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
Ivan Illich
#51. The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.
Ivan Illich
#52. The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.
Ivan Illich
#53. 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
Ivan Illich
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Ivan Illich
#56. P24- the power of school loss to divide social reality has no boundaries education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational
Ivan Illich
#57. Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
Ivan Illich
#58. We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
Ivan Illich
#59. I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less.
Ivan Illich
#60. Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
#61. The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.
Ivan Illich
#62. The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
Ivan Illich
#63. I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death
Ivan Illich
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top