Ivan Illich Quotes (17 Quotes)

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.

Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up.

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 and die.

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.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Latin America can no longer tolerate being a haven for United States liberals who cannot make their point at home, an outlet for apostles too apostolic to find their vocation as competent professionals within their own community.

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.

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

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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

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

Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of Sacralizing person and community.

Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they 'speak with the accent of natives' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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.