Ivan Illich Quotes

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

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized.

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat history and 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Education, Society

  Tags in Advertising, Agency

• We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Rediscovered

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

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in God

  Tags in Prayer

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

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Society

  Tags in School

• 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

  Topics in Attitude

  Tags in Good

• 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

  Topics in Life

  Tags in School, Care

• Leadership does not depend on being right.

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Leadership

  Tags in Depend

• 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

  Topics in Health, Work

  Tags in Diet

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

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Health

  Tags in Care, Fact

• At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

  Ivan Illich

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Hope, Moment

• 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

  Tags in Medical

Ivan Illich (14)

Birth:	4th September, 1926
Death:	2nd December, 2002
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Philosopher, Priest

About

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna, Austria. He 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. He studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence in Italy, as well as theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and earned his PhD in History from the University of Salzburg. He wrote several books include: Celebration of Awareness, Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, Medical Nemesis, Limits to medicine, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Shadow Work, Gender, and H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.

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Births

• 1925 - Simon Van Der Meer
• 1957 - Denise Crosby
• 1925 - William F. Buckley, Jr.
• 1948 - Spider Robinson
• 1938 - Oscar Robertson

Deaths

• 1963 - Lee Harvey Oswald
• 2005 - Pat Morita
• 2004 - Warren Spahn
• 1990 - Fred Shero
• 1991 - Paul Charles Caravello