Quotes by Ivan Illich

About Ivan Illich:

Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary Western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 pla...

Ivan Illich

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

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 a...

Ivan Illich

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

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

Ivan Illich

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Ivan Illich

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich

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

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

Ivan Illich

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Ivan Illich

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...

Ivan Illich

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce...

Ivan Illich

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 pe...

Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich

Les enfants sont par définition des apprentis, et apprendre est l'activité humaine qui nécessite le moins de manipulation par autrui. La majeure partie de l'apprentissage n'est pas le resultat de l'instruction. Elle serait plutôt le résultat d'u...

Ivan Illich

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

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

I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't...

Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich

Author Bio

  • NameIvan Illich
  • Descriptionaustrian philosopher and theologist
  • BornSeptember 4, 1926
  • DiedDecember 2, 2002
  • CountryAustria
  • ProfessionWriter; Historian; Educationist; Philosopher