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Quotes of Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich (Vienna, September 4, 1926 - Bremen, December 2, 2002) was an Austrian philosopher and anarchist social critic, whose polemics on various forms of professional authority earned him worldwide notoriety. Author of an informal series of critiques of the institutions of "modern" culture, he addressed issues such as education, medicine, work, energy use, economic development, and gender. His work was most widely known in the 1970s, yet today is hard to find, and not part of the academic canon.
- At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
- Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
- 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, or die.
- Leadership does not depend on being right.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The public school has become the established church of secular society.
- There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
- We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.