Ivan Illich Quotes

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

Modernization is found in markets.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste.

Advertising prods people into wanting more and better things. Of course advertising makes people dissatisfied with what they have - makes them raise their sights. Mighty good thing it does. Nothing could be worse for the United States than 200,000,000 satisfied Americans.

America was in full swing now, all the papers said so, and people were rushing forward, leaving behind the horrors of war. She understood the reasons, but they were rushing, like Lon, toward long hours and profits, neglecting the things that brought beauty to the world.

Vietnam remains an underdeveloped economy with a high poverty incidence, ... party, people and army will continue to stand united and ... turn Vietnam into a developed country in the coming decades.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

in the comparatively short time between my childhood and my daughter's, the business society has ceased urging people to produce and is now exerting its very considerable influence to get them to consume.

People have material needs, but you don't need a deodorant for every different day of the week. You don't need four hundred varieties of mustard. This is what I call too many choices. There are too many choices in America.

We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

If you sell to the rich, you will become poor. If you sell to the poor, you can become rich. It is easier to get one peso from a million poor people than to get one million from one rich person.

Our identity in the world must change from Scam India to Skill India.

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.

The people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend most of their time worrying about not having enough.

The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.

People aren't happy unless they buy stuff, and that's because we have become this industrialized nation.

I've lived a lot in communist countries and they're intensely interested in money. I think they are more interested in money than capitalists are. They're the most materialistic people in the world. What they're actually living for is material things. The irony of that is that in communist countries there isn't anything to buy.