Quotes from Ivan Illich

All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.

Through intravenous feeding, blood transfusions, and surgical techniques, more of those who get to the hospital survive trauma, but survival rates for the most common types of cancer—those which make up 90 percent of the cases—have remained virtually unchanged over the last twenty-five years.

The bourgeoisie who could afford to eliminate 'social death' by avoiding retirement, created 'childhood' to keep their young under control.

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture.

Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people's time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time.

Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.

Rather than asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs.

Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.

Même si on découvrait une source d'énergie propre et abondante, la consommation massive d'énergie aurait toujours sur le corps social le même effet que l'intoxication par une drogue physiquement inoffensive, mais psychiquement asservissante.

Passé un certain point, plus d'énergie signifie moins d'équité. Au rythme du plus rapide moyen de transport, on voit gonfler le traitement de faveur réservé à quelques-uns aux frais des autres.

If the greatest fruit of man's labor should be the education he receives from it and the opportunity which work gives him to initiate the education of others, then the alienation of modern society in a pedagogical sense is even worse than its economic alienation.

Le vélo élève la mobilité autogène de l'homme jusqu'à un nouveau degré, au-delà duquel il n'y a plus en théorie de progrès possible. À l'opposé, la cabine individuelle accélérée a rendu les sociétés capables de s'engager dans un rituel de la vitesse qui progressivement les paralyse.

The proposal that doctors not be licensed by an in-group does not mean that their services shall not be evaluated, but rather that this evaluation can be done more effectively by informed clients than by their own peers.

Sudden change is of a different order than feedback or evolution. Observe the whirlpools below a waterfall. For many seasons the eddies stay in the same place no matter whether the water is high or low. Then, suddenly, one more stone falls into the basin, the entire array changes, and the old can never be reconstructed.

The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum packages capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescense prior even to satisfaction.

P4- no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.

everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor. Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.

Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal--as opposed to institutional-service.

P24- the power of school loss to divide social reality has no boundaries education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational

during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines

A vast amount of contemporary clinical care is incidental to the curing of disease, but the damage done by medicine to the health of individuals and populations is very significant.

Crescere nella condizione di bambino significa essere condannati ad un conflitto disumano tra la propria coscienza di sé e il ruolo imposto da una società che sta attraversando la propria età scolare.

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