Ivan Illich quotes - page 3

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:

While once friendship in our western tradition was the supreme flower of politics, I think that if community life exists at all today, it is in some way the consequence of friendship cultivated by each one who initiates it.

Ivan Illich

He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

Ivan Illich

Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Ivan Illich

Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.

Ivan Illich

Community in our European tradition is not the outcome of an act of authoritative foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of management, planning and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual, somatic and gratuitous gift to each other.

Ivan Illich

This breaking of the limitations of hospitality to a small in-group, of offering it to the broadest possible in-group, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as the key message of Christianity.

Ivan Illich

Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.

Ivan Illich

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

Ivan Illich

A transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation.

Ivan Illich

By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.

Ivan Illich

Peace as the commingling of soil and waters sounds cute to my ears; but peace as the result of conspiratio exacts a demanding, today almost unimaginable intimacy.

Ivan Illich

Churches also have their problems with a Jesus whose only economics are jokes.

Ivan Illich

Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community.

Ivan Illich

The customary law which humanized the environment by establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.

Ivan Illich

A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

Ivan Illich

His gesture is that of a clown; it shows that this miracle is not meant to prove him omnipotent but indifferent to matters of money. Who wants power submits to the Devil and who wants denarri submits to the Caesar.

Ivan Illich

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Ivan Illich

Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

Ivan Illich

I can choose. I have to choose.

Ivan Illich

Through the act of eating, the fellow conspirators were transformed into a "we," a gathering which in Greek means ecclesia. Further, they believed that the "we" is also somebody's "I"; they were nourished by shading into the "I" of the Incarnate Word.

Ivan Illich

The latent function of schooling, that is, the hidden curriculum, which forms individuals into needy people who know that they have now satisfied a little bit of their needs for education, is much more important...

Ivan Illich

I do not believe that friendship today can flower out - can come out - of political life. I do believe that if there is something like a political life to be - to remain for us, in this world of technology - then it begins with friendship.

Ivan Illich