“Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.”
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, Deschooling Society“The public school has become the established church of secular society.”
Ivan Illich“Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery. ”
Ivan Illich“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.”
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“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.”
Ivan Illich“Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.”
Ivan Illich