"Ivan Illich" was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary Western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.

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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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.