At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church....

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

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Les enfants sont par définition des apprentis, et apprendre est l’activité humaine qui nécessite le moins de manipulation par autrui. La majeure partie de l’apprentissage n’est pas le resultat de l’instruction. Elle serait plutôt le...

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying. . . . Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to...

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and...

Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up.

P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty

Modern 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.

Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.

School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school...

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic “economic” behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the...

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery . . .

I was recently told, ‘You’re a liar!’ when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just...

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding...

Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal,...

Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school