“This breaking of the limitations of hospitality to a small in-group, of offering it to the broadest possible in-group, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as the key message of Christianity.”

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“Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects... The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.”

from We the People interview (1996)

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“By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as 'devil' and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing.”

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

from Tools for Conviviality (1973)

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“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.”

from Medical Nemesis (1976)

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“A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.”

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“Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people.”

from Silence is a Commons (1982)

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“Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us...

.”

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“Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and such machines force people to behave like machines... Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.”

from Silence is a Commons (1982)

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“School is an advertising agency that makes you believe that you need society as it is... Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting... yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”

from Deschooling Society (1971)​

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“The latent function of schooling, the hidden curriculum, forms individuals into needy people... Our society doesn't only produce artifact things, but artifact people...How did it come about that such a crazy process like schooling would become necessary?... The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”

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“He comes to believe that political power... is the result of access to the television screen... what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.”

from Energy and Equity (1974)

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“We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.”

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“The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place”

from Shadow Work

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“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 only persons can work towards them.”

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“The quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.”

from The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies

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“The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.”

from Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis

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“I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less.”

from Gender

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“To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.”

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