Top 40 Ivan Illich Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”

— Ivan Illich

2. “The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.”

— Ivan Illich

3. “In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

— Ivan Illich

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

— Ivan Illich

5. “School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.”

— Ivan Illich

6. “Rodeado por herramientas todopoderosas, el hombre queda reducido a ser instrumento de sus instrumentos.”

— Ivan Illich

7. “Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.”

— Ivan Illich

8. “We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only – ‘to learn’ becomes ‘to accumulate credits’.”

— Ivan Illich

9. “The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.”

— Ivan Illich

10. “Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.”

— Ivan Illich

11. “In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.”

— Ivan Illich

12. “The computer is credited with the capacity to create unsuspected amounts of busywork. We are straight on our way towards an energy-obsessed low energy society in a world that worships work but has nothing for people to do.”

— Ivan Illich

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

— Ivan Illich

14. “Man’s consciously lived fragility, individuality and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline.”

— Ivan Illich

15. “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.”

— Ivan Illich

16. “A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”

— Ivan Illich

17. “Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”

— Ivan Illich

18. “The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people’s confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.”

— Ivan Illich

19. “In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete... Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.”

— Ivan Illich

20. “I was recently told, ‘You’re a liar!’ when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can’t walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.”

— Ivan Illich

21. “Only when we stop looking at male roles and forms of power as the norm and begin to look at female arrangements and perceive them as equally valid and significant – though perhaps different in form – can we see how male and female roles are intertwined, and begin to understand how human societies operate.”

— Ivan Illich

22. “Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man’s planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.”

— Ivan Illich

23. “Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society.”

— Ivan Illich

24. “Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one’s children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.”

— Ivan Illich

25. “P7- citizens have learned to think rich and live poor.”

— Ivan Illich

26. “Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers.”

— Ivan Illich

27. “Excessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy the social, cultural, and environmental conditions for equal productive freedom.”

— Ivan Illich

28. “We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.”

— Ivan Illich

29. “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.”

— Ivan Illich

30. “The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place.”

— Ivan Illich

31. “Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.”

— Ivan Illich

32. “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.”

— Ivan Illich

33. “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.”

— Ivan Illich

34. “A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.”

— Ivan Illich

35. “In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person’s judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.”

— Ivan Illich

36. “The military institution is evidently absurd. The absurdity of non-military institutions is more difficult to face. It is even more frightening, precisely because it operates inexorably. We know which switch must stay open to avoid atomic holocaust. No switch detains an ecological Armageddon.”

— Ivan Illich

37. “I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independant, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.”

— Ivan Illich

38. “The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services... What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.”

— Ivan Illich

39. “School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”

— Ivan Illich

40. “The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.”

— Ivan Illich

41. “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.”

— Ivan Illich

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

— Ivan Illich

43. “A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”

— Ivan Illich

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

— Ivan Illich