Ivan Illich

“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.”

“Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.”

“Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks which a person might propose to himself. Schools, when they are compulsory - as we see at this moment in the United States - create a dazed population, a 'learned' population, a mentally pretentious population, such as we have never seen before.”

“A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of those liberties is based are equally distributed to all.”

“At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.”

“By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'”

“I didn't want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a postdoctoral thesis, which they call a 'Habilitation' in German universities, on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great.”