Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Ivan Illich
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
Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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.

Ivan Illich
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
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 acceptance of gifts.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich
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 them.

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

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.