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Ivan Illich

4 September 1926-2 December 2002

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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.

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Biomedicine is a negation of health, organized not around the idea of serving human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

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A Consumer society is a society in which there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

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Democracy is only possible when no one travels faster than the speed of a bicycle.

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Humanitarianism is a naive enterprise due to limits of solidarity and the difficulties of transcending class difference.

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Modem medicine is a negation of health, organized not to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

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School is an institution built on the disproven axiom that learning is the result of teaching.

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

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Western 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.