In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
—Ivan Illich
Topics: Envy
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
—Ivan Illich
Topics: Prayer
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.
—Ivan Illich
Topics: Silence
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
—Ivan Illich
Topics: Education
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
Topics: Goodness
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.
—Ivan Illich
Topics: School, Education
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
Topics: Medicine
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