Ivan Illich Quotes

So you start one person at a time. Change one person, you can change a village.

A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.

In our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

I think the growth of the brain is a slow process. But you do change and the more you accept change and embrace change, the better.

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

I think it's an aggregation of all of the small acts that are really transformative. I think a group of small acts transform the individual. And maybe when the individual transforms, collectively we transform.

All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.

I think change is always a good thing. Change keeps things moving.

We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.

No, hear me out. The long answer to that question is that everything about me has changed since meeting you. What I wanted five months ago is different from what I want today. Did I want a human body? Yes, very much. Is it my top priority now? No." He looked at me with serious eyes."I gave up something I wanted for something I need. And I need you, Angel. More than I think you'll ever know. ~Patch

The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march

in race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.

It takes as little as 1% of a population to create positive change, and I believe that if 100 million people underwent a personal transformation in the direction of peace, harmony, laughter, love, kindness, and joy...the world would be transformed.

people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice.

I think that just talking about what guys shouldn’t do, we got to also make sure that you can do your part to do whatever you can do to make, to try to make sure it doesn’t happen.

This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

I do think that people have a desire to talk about issues they may have wanted to avoid before. I've never had so many random conversations with people where they're so ready to talk about race, gender, sexual identity, or things that are happening in politics.

You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

Young people are tremendously frustrated because they don't see politics as changing anything. They see it as perpetuating a system that frankly doesn't work and no matter who you vote for things don't really change. Social media is where I think a bold message will wake them up. We saw that a little bit in the Occupy movement. Over the next three years, I think young people are going to wake up and be empowered.