Ivan Illich Quotes

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

I have created a life by stepping out of the box of people's limitations. I call it zigging when others are zagging.

I've got to make a new life for myself, I'm out to learn how to enjoy my leisure now that I'm retired. I've been doing things people expected of me always. I want to feel free. I want to sit under a linden tree with nothing more important to worry about than the temperature of the beer, if there is anything more important.

It's hard to tell people who they should hang out with and who they shouldn't, especially if they aren't ready to hear that. You have to let your friends make their own mistakes sometimes. You can't protect them from everything, or else they'll never learn

I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.

Were I to solve problems for others they would remain stagnant; they would never grow. It would be a great injustice to them. My approach is to help with cause rather than effect. When I help others, it is by instilling within them the inspiration to work out problems by themselves. If you feed a man a meal, you only feed him for a day-but if you teach a man to grow food, you feed him for a lifetime.

When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.

Just to stay focused on my path and not the path that other people or media want to put me in. Just to stay focused on my vision, because I put out what I want people to know about me. Everything else is what the media puts out.

Pretty much I want to be Steve Wozniak, who I decided I was at a young age and not change. I want to go back to school and get my college degree like I would have without Apple. I want to teach young kids like I would have without Apple. And part of it is I'm accessible. I'm open. And so many people e-mail me and get me. And as much as I can I try to answer people, listen to them, be polite and say yes.

The problem with education is school.

Live life on your own path. Everybody's got something different. You can't keep up with all those people, so you better keep up with yourself.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

I teach people how to become limitless.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

The two kinds of people on earth are the people who lift and the people who lean.

What a friend we have in a tree, the tree is the symbol of hope, self improvement and what people can do for themselves.

She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons.

Your parents ask you to follow the standard path: School, job, security. Is this really the best way? I don't think so - be your own boss!

Rather than look at a marriage as two people morphing into one thing, you could see two individuals who are choosing to form a partnership.

I'm in a position where it doesn't matter what people think of me now.

The only thing I have to say to people - try being the hero of your own world one day. Don't spend your life thinking about what somebody did or if they failed at this or if they did great at that or they got caught with a monkey, in a bathtub, having sex. You should at one point become the hero of your own world.