Quotes from Ivan Illich

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

If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.

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.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

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.

The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

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.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.

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.

Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.

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.'

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.

I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death

What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?

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

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

School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.

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.

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.

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

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Leadership does not depend on being right.