Ivan Illich quotes

Ivan Illich was an Austrian-born philosopher and social critic known for his influential works on education, medicine, and modern institutions. His books, such as "Deschooling Society" and "Medical Nemesis," challenged conventional views and inspired global debates on the limits of institutionalization. He encouraged radical alternatives to traditional systems and remains a significant figure in social thought. Here are 93 of his quotes:

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

Ivan Illich

People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.

Ivan Illich

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Ivan Illich

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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

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

Ivan Illich

Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.

Ivan Illich

Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.

Ivan Illich

I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.

Ivan Illich

To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.

Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

Ivan Illich

Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.

Ivan Illich

Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.

Ivan Illich

Speaking about pax in the proto-Christan epoch turned out to be a delicate matter, because around the year 300 pax became a key word in the Christian liturgy. It became the euphemism for a mouth-to-mouth kiss among the faithful attending services; pax became the camouflage for the osculum (from os, mouth), or the conspiratio, a commingling of breaths.

Ivan Illich

Electronic management as a political issue can be approached in several ways. I propose, at the beginning of this public consultation, to approach the issue as one of political ecology. Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired a new meaning. It is still the name for a branch of professional biology, but the term now increasingly serves as the label under which a broad, politically organized general public analyzes and influences technical decisions.

Ivan Illich

I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.

Ivan Illich

Increasingly people live in an artifact and become artifacts themselves, feel satisfied, feel fit for that artifact insofar as they themselves have been manipulated.

Ivan Illich

The two of us haven't seen each other for a year now, and when we saw each other we bowed in front of each other. This very idea of bowing - you don't bow in front of a screen. It's made impossible, or very difficult, for people who constantly see non-persons on the screen.

Ivan Illich

As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

Ivan Illich

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

Ivan Illich

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich