Ivan Illich Men Quotations

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.

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

The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.

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

The knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the knowledge of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is objective - defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined... and fed into a process, now called decision-making. This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.

Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and religion and work and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into others.

We can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social and economic systems that divide the world between the over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether government leader or protester, business executive or worker, professor or student, share a common guilt.

The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

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

The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's 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.