As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.
--Ivan Illich
At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
--Ivan Illich
Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
--Ivan Illich
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
--Ivan Illich
Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects.
--Ivan Illich
It is from your eye that I find myself.
--Ivan Illich
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds.
--Ivan Illich
Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
--Ivan Illich
Leadership does not depend on being right.
--Ivan Illich
Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines.
--Ivan Illich
Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
--Ivan Illich
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
--Ivan Illich
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.
--Ivan Illich
People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
--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
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
--Ivan Illich
Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.
--Ivan Illich
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
--Ivan Illich
Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.
--Ivan Illich
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role.
--Ivan Illich
To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.
--Ivan Illich
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
--Ivan Illich
We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
--Ivan Illich
Found 23 occurence(s) in 52,551 quotation(s).