Ivan Illich Quotes
Most people, throughout history, haven't learned one language to the exclusion of another. You learn to speak differently to a peasant and to a shoemaker. You speak differently to your mother, who comes from Burgundy, and to your father, who comes from Swabia.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
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
Austrian priest
The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
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
Austrian priest
We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks which a person might propose to himself. Schools, when they are compulsory - as we see at this moment in the United States - create a dazed population, a 'learned' population, a mentally pretentious population, such as we have never seen before.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with - or protect - the privacy of their exchange.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
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
Austrian priest
Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl.
Ivan Illich
Austrian priest
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