Ivan Illich's Quotes

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.

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.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

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.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

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

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

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

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.