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.
Quotes to Explore
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I always get sick of these conversations where people are so obsessed with pixels, with high definition, and even with technology in general. I find it just dull and heartless. And so I wanted to use only the worst machines.
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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.
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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.
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You're not sick you're just in love.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a human being, and I get sick.
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So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.
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To me, politics is an extension of what I do in medicine.
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I'm sick of running away from things.
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I don't like clothes. I don't especially like cars. I have a very nice house. I get sick on a boat.
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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.
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I entered medicine to use it as a vehicle for social change.
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Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population.
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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.
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To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
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I have stayed true to that first idea that people can have a day in their lives that is very important and if they can reconnect with that day, reconnect with the people they were then, they can suddenly revive their emotions.
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There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.
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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.
