Ivan Illich Quotes

Most people, throughout history, haven‘t learned one language to the exclusion of another. You learn to speak differently to a peasant and to a shoemaker. You speak differently to your mother, who comes from Burgundy, and to your father, who comes from Swabia.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

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.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand.

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.