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. Ivan Illich Read Quote
The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand. Ivan Illich Read Quote
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. Ivan Illich Read Quote
Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it… Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment. Ivan Illich Read Quote
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.’ Ivan Illich Read Quote
Once the Third World has become a mass market for the goods, products, and processes which are designed by the rich for themselves, the discrepancy between demand for these Western artifacts and the supply will increase indefinitely. Ivan Illich Read Quote
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable… self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life. Ivan Illich Read Quote
Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness. Ivan Illich Read Quote
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. Ivan Illich Read Quote
