Ivan Illich Quotes

Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars
because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, and because they do not feel personally deprived of freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already littered with roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has been paralyzed for so long that the ability for it seems to have atrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get 4d of when it has frozen not
only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and of imagination. Radical monopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late. ~ Ivan Illich

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

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need. ~ Ivan Illich

The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health. ~ Ivan Illich

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

P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty ~ Ivan Illich

Most curable sickness can now be diagnosed and treated by laymen. People find it so difficult to accept this statement because the complexity of medical ritual has hidden from them the simplicity of its basic procedures. It took the example of
the barefoot doctor in China to show how modern practice by simple workers in their spare time could, in three years,
catapult health care in China to levels unparalleled elsewhere. In most other countries health care by laymen is considered a
crime. A seventeen-year-old friend of mine was recently tried for having treated some 130 of her high-school colleagues for
VD. She was acquitted on a technicality by the judge when expert counsel compared her performance with that of the U.S. Health Service. Nowhere in the U.S.A. can her achievement be considered "standard," because she succeeded in making retests on all her patients six weeks after their first treatment. Progress should mean growing competence in self-care rather than growing dependence. 5 ~ Ivan Illich

Growth has become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments. Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They have become tolerant to
escalating marginal disutility. They are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. ~ Ivan Illich

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

The university graduate has been schooled for selective
service among the rich of the world.

Üniversite bitirenler dünya varsıllarına seçkin hizmetlerde bulunmaları hedefiyle okutulmuşlardır. ~ Ivan Illich

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. ~ Ivan Illich

The USDHEW calculates that 7% of all patients suffer compensable injuries while hospitalized ... One out of every five patients admitted to a typical research hospital acquires an iatrogenic (Caused by the treatment process) disease, one case in thirty leading to death. Half of these episodes result from complications of drug therapy; amazingly, one in ten come from diagnostic procedures. ~ Ivan Illich

The richer we get in a consumer society, the more acutely we become aware of how many grades of value--of both leisure and labor--we have climbed. The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits. The joy of listening to the neighborhood finch is easily overshadowed by stereophonic recordings of "Bird Songs of the World," the walk through the park downgraded by preparations for a packaged bird-watching tour into the jungle. It becomes difficult to economize time when all commitments are for the long run. Staffan Linder points out that there is a strong tendency for us to over-commit to the future, so that when the future becomes present, we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four. In addition to the mere fact that time has competitive uses and high marginal utility in an affluent society, this overcommitment creates a sense of pressure and harriedness. ~ Ivan Illich

The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance. ~ Ivan Illich

Latin America can no longer tolerate being a haven for United States liberals who cannot make their point at home, an outlet for apostles too "apostolic" to find their vocation as competent professionals within their own community. The hardware salesman threatens to dump second-rate imitations of parishes, schools and catechisms
out-moded even in the United States
all around the continent. The traveling escapist threatens further to confuse a foreign world with his superficial protests, which are not viable even at home. ~ Ivan Illich

An ever growing part of our major institutions' functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...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. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution. ~ Ivan Illich

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

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...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

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. ~ Ivan Illich

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Ivan Illich

Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step ... If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story. ~ Ivan Illich

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less. ~ Ivan Illich

It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning
and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature. ~ Ivan Illich

Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and
care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends ~ Ivan Illich

If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story. ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Ivan Illich

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health. ~ Ivan Illich

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working. ~ Jane Hirshfield

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another. ~ Ivan Illich

Above all, political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity, the solving of puzzles rather than the unpredictably creative activity of individual people. Science is now used to label a spectral production agency which turns out better knowledge just as medicine produces better health. The damage done by this misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge is even more fundamental than the damage done to the conceptions of health, education, or mobility by their identification with institutional outputs. False expectations
of better health corrupt society, but they do so in only one particular sense. They foster a declining concern with healthful environments, healthy life styles, and competence in the personal care of one's neighbor. Deceptions about health are circumstantial. The institutionalization of knowledge leads to a more general and degrading delusion. It makes people
dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination. ~ Ivan Illich

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

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

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation. ~ Ivan Illich

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. ~ Ivan Illich

Schools teach the need to be taught. ~ Ivan Illich

P4- no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. ~ Ivan Illich

A just society would be one in which liberty for one person is constrained only by the demands created by equal liberty for
another. Such a society requires as a precondition an agreement excluding tools that by their very nature prevent such liberty.
This is true for tools that are fundamentally purely social arrangements, such as the school system, as well as for tools that are
physical machines. In a convivial society compulsory and open-ended schooling would have to be excluded for the sake of
justice. Age-specific, compulsory competition on an unending ladder for lifelong privileges cannot increase equality but must
favor those who start earlier, or who are healthier, or who are better equipped outside the classroom. Inevitably, it organizes
society into many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed
more education deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole. A society constructed so
that education by means of schools is a necessity for its functioning cannot be a just society. Power tools having certain
Tools for Conviviality
Page 18 Document developed using Purplestructural characteristics are inevitably manipulative and must also be eliminated for the sake of justice. In a modern society,
energy inputs represent one of the major new liberties. Each man's ability to produce change depends on his ability to control ~ Ivan Illich

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of
licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.
Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen
and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their
pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico
suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than
most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the
discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions. ~ Ivan Illich

New power meant a new relation to time. The lending of money against interest was considered "against nature" by the
Church: money naturally was a means of exchange to buy necessities, not a capital that could work or bear fruits. During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned this view-though reluctantly
to accept the fact that Christians had become capitalist merchants. Time became like money: I now can have a few hours before lunch; how shall I spend time? . I am
short of time so I can't afford to spend that much time on a committee; it's not worth the time ... It world be a waste of time; I'd rather save an hour ~ Ivan Illich

The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Hierarchies must rise and conglomerate as they extend over fewer and larger corporations. A seat in a high-rise job is the most coveted and contested product of expanding industry. The lack of schooling, compounded with sex, color, and peculiar persuasions, now keeps most people down. Minorities organized by women, or blacks, or the unorthodox succeed at best in getting some of their members through school and into an expensive job. They claim victory when they get equal pay for equal rank. Paradoxically, these movements strengthen the idea that unequal graded work is necessary and that high-rise hierarchies are necessary to produce what an egalitarian society needs. If properly schooled, the black porter will blame himself for not being a black lawyer. At the same time, schooling generates a new intensity of frustration which ultimately can act as social dynamite. 6 ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Ivan Illich

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they 'speak with the accent of natives' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds. ~ Ivan Illich

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

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed. ~ Ivan Illich

The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand. Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Not to produce what is possible would expose the law of "rising expectations" as a euphemism for a growing frustration gap, which is the motor of a society built on the co-production of services and increased demand. ~ Ivan Illich

P3- everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling. ~ Ivan Illich

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

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

This blindness is a result of the broken balance of learning. People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal growth as an accumulation of institutional outputs, and prefer what institutions make over what they themselves can do. They repress the ability to discover reality by their own lights. The skewed balance of learning explains why the radical monopoly of commodities has become imperceptible. It does not explain why people feel impotent to correct those profound disorders which they do perceive. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration. ~ Ivan Illich

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

P3- modernised poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency ~ Ivan Illich

We have failed ... through our lack of responsible awareness ... and thus added to suffering around the world. All of us are cripples-some physically, some mentally, some emotionally. We must, therefore, strive cooperatively to create a new world. There is no time left for destruction, for hatred, for anger. We must build, in hope and joy and celebration. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. ~ Ivan Illich

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised. ~ Ivan Illich

P7- citizens have learned to think rich and live poor. ~ Ivan Illich

P24- the power of school loss to divide social reality has no boundaries education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational ~ Ivan Illich

Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us. ~ Ivan Illich

The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Ivan Illich

A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist. ~ Ivan Illich

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

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

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable. ~ Ivan Illich

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen. ~ Ivan Illich

The medicalization of early diagnosis not only hampers and discourages preventative health-care but it also trains the patient-to-be to function in the meantime as an acolyte to his doctor. He learns to depend on the physician in sickness and in health. He turns into a life-long patient. ~ Ivan Illich

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting. ~ Ivan Illich

People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them. ~ Ivan Illich

Above all, by depriving people of the ability to satisfy personal needs in a
personal manner, radical monopoly creates radical scarcity of personal
as opposed to institutional-service. ~ Ivan Illich

What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn? ~ Ivan Illich

The suspicion that something is structurally wrong with the vision of homo faber is common to a growing minority in capitalist, communist, and "underdeveloped" countries alike. This suspicion is the shared characteristic of a new elite. To it belong people of all classes, incomes, faiths, and civilizations. They have become wary of the myths of the majority: of scientific utopias, of ideological diabolism, and of the expectation of the distribution of goods and services with some degree of equality. They share with the majority the awareness that most new policies adopted by broad consensus consistently lead to results which are glaringly opposed to their stated aims. Yet whereas the Promethean majority of would-be spacemen still evades the structural issue, the emergent minority is critical of the scientific deus ex machina, the ideological panacea, and the hunt for devils and witches. This minority begins to formulate its suspicion that our constant deceptions tie us to contemporary institutions as the chains bound Prometheus to his rock. Hopeful trust and classical irony must conspire to expose the Promethean fallacy. ~ Ivan Illich

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

Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them, whether it be the Mafia, stockholders, a foreign company, the state,
or even a workers' commune. Networks of multilane highways, long. range, wide-band-width transmitters, strip mines, or
compulsory school systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality, which is the primary treasure in many
so-called "underdeveloped" areas. ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Ivan Illich

Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life. ~ Ivan Illich

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

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

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. ~ Ivan Illich

I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. ~ Ivan Illich

The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one. ~ Ivan Illich

Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced. ~ Ivan Illich

You live in the most sacred place
in the universe:
right here,
right now. ~ Ivan M. Granger

He entered the house quickly, pushed past the detectives, and clasped both of Alexandria's hands in his.
Something deep within Aidan coiled dangerously at the sight of her hands in Thomas Ivan's. His breath stopped. His heart ceased to beat. The demon within stirred and roared for release, fangs exploded into his mouth, and the red haze of the beasts flamed in his eyes. As Thomas leaned in close, intending to kiss her cheek, Aidan fought for control so that he could casually wave a hand, directing a flurry of dust spores to whirl and dance beneath Ivan's nose. As Ivan inhaled, he began to sneeze violently, the spasms wracking his entire body. ~ Christine Feehan

Victims of misfortune are quick to sense another of their kind from a distance, but in old age they rarely become friends, which is in no way surprising: they have nothing to share together - not even hope. ~ Ivan Turgenev

Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize. ~ Ivan E. Coyote

Mal had made me promise not to cry. He'd said it would only make it harder on him. So I swallowed my tears. I kissed him one last time and let Ivan lead me away. ~ Leigh Bardugo

She worries because she fears what the world might do to you, and because she doesn't know any successful tattooed butch storytellers with biceps and a brush cut. Yet. ~ Ivan E. Coyote

I was between 2 and 3 in the world for two, three years. That's not exactly where I wanted to be. ~ Ivan Lendl

We always look at opportunities. We are not aggressively looking to buy something. ~ Ivan Glasenberg