Ivan Illich

Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life.

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

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

The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match mans metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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.

The re establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.

It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures women get less.

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

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.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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

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.

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.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

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