Ivan Illich

“Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution.”

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

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

“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”

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

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

“Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently obscured by the medical establishment.”

“We have embodied in law the principle that the citizen has a right to be protected against the consequences of his own irresponsibility.”

“We must learn to live within the limits of necessity, in order to be free.”

“For most people, the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.”

“Progress has come to mean the replacement of what works with what is fashionable.”

“To be unable to say no is to be a slave.”

“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption.”

“The establishment of a radical monopoly happens when one industrial product becomes the standard response to a basic human need.”

“Schooling, the promotion of learning in treatment centers staffed by official teachers, has become a world religion.”

“Friendship is by its very nature freer of any goal than are all other human relationships.”

“The university has become a place where the sacred gets turned into curriculum.”

“I owe my intellectual survival to the public library, where I could find things that I was not supposed to read.”