Ivan Illich Quotes

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Ivan Illich

• Sick
• Medicine
• Heals

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Quotes to Explore

• The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.

  

  Irwin Redlener
  • Children
  • Kids
  • High

• I took this 'how to build computers' course basically because I'm sick and tired of getting ripped off by cheesy computer companies. Software baffles me. I like hardware. I used to change my own oil, and now I want to build my own computer so I can have what I want.

  

  Pat Cadigan
  • Change
  • Me
  • Tired

• You're not sick you're just in love.

  

  Irving Berlin
  • Love
  • Sick
  • For Her

• I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.

  

  Harold E. Varmus
  • Life
  • Different
  • Future

• I really don't know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I've just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven't had a hugely eventful life - maybe I'm compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I'm just a bit sick.

  

  Laura Wade
  • Life
  • Truth
  • Death

• I'm a human being, and I get sick.

  

  Kat Graham
  • Human
  • Sick
  • Human being

• So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.

  

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • People
  • Good
  • Evil

• To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine.

  

  Tabare Vazquez
  • Me
  • Politics
  • Medicine

• I'm sick of running away from things.

  

  Natalia Kills
  • Running
  • Sick
  • Away

• I don't like clothes. I don't especially like cars. I have a very nice house. I get sick on a boat.

  

  Xavier Niel
  • House
  • Nice
  • Sick

• We're all sick of holy wars and bloodshed because religion is supposed to give us life and a better life and is supposed to bring out our best self. When it results in mass destruction and hatred and anxiety, it's the antithesis I think of what religion was designed to do.

  

  Vera Farmiga
  • Life
  • Best
  • Religion

• Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.

  

  Florence Nightingale
  • Sick

• In these ways the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life. Psychological incompatibility has proven to be more controlling than financial feasibility, and the Great Society has become a sick society.

  

  J. William Fulbright
  • Life
  • Great
  • War

• To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.

  

  Charles Lamb
  • Sick

• A lot of the things that happened to me came out of the blue, but I'm exactly the same person now as I was when I was sick. I'm still a very optimistic person.

  

  Jameela Jamil
  • Sick
  • Blue
  • Optimistic

• When I first started out, 'Time' magazine did an article on what it called 'the sick comics,' and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered 'sick.'

  

  Bob Newhart
  • Time
  • May
  • Sick

• The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

  

  Frans van Houten
  • People
  • Money
  • Society

• I decided I was sick of trying to figure out what everybody else wanted, and I should just decide what I want, and be honest, and not spend all my time guessing.

  

  Katherine Heigl
  • Time
  • Trying
  • Sick

• I row my boat on the river. I swim, ski, walk, lift weights, do yoga and Pilates. I don't want to be a weak, sick 90-year-old.

  

  Lynda Carter
  • Sick
  • Yoga
  • River

• Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.

  

  Muddy Waters
  • Country
  • House
  • Sick

• I am committed to the people who are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars being used to fund unethical people and corporations.

  

  Carl Hart
  • People
  • Tired
  • Sick

• I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

  

  Ernest Hemingway
  • Company
  • Failing
  • Medicine

• When I finish a film, I like to drastically change my appearance. I get sick of looking at the same thing in the mirror for months at a time. So when a film's over, I'll do something like shave my head.

  

  Ethan Embry
  • Film
  • Sick
  • Appearance

• Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

  

  Ivan Illich
  • Sick
  • Medicine
  • Heals