Words matter. These are the best Ivan Illich Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.
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.
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.
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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.
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.
We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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.
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.
Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
I didn’t want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a postdoctoral thesis, which they call a ‘Habilitation’ in German universities, on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great.
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.
Once the Third World has become a mass market for the goods, products, and processes which are designed by the rich for themselves, the discrepancy between demand for these Western artifacts and the supply will increase indefinitely.
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.’
So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.
We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
