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The peculiarly modern inability to use personal endowments, communal life, and environmental resources in an autonomous way infects every aspect of life where a professionally engineered commodity has succeeded in replacing a culturally shaped use-value. The opportunity to experience personal and social satisfaction outside the market is thus destroyed.

— Ivan Illich Toward a History of Needs (1978)

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More quotes by Ivan Illich

A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

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

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

Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Churches also have their problems with a Jesus whose only economics are jokes.

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.

Deschooling Society (1971)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ivan Illich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.