Ivan Illich Quotes

We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which former...

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

Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety o...

In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time ex...

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit ...

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that the...

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

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the emp...

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the lik...

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument ...

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemploymen...

Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical ...

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, ...

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechan...

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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

All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize t...

The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can atta...

The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determ...

Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow ...

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

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the pr...

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

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children...

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation ...

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salva...

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-end...

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value oflicenses. Certification constitutes a fo...

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more c...

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They creat...

Excessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy t...

P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class ...

In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The...

Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or e...

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

A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exe...