I do not believe that friendship today can flower out — can come out — of political life. I do believe that if there is something like a political li… - Ivan Illich

"Most curable sickness can now be diagnosed and treated by laymen. People find it so difficult to accept this statement because the complexity of medical ritual has hidden from them the simplicity of its basic procedures. It took the example of
the barefoot doctor in China to show how modern practice by simple workers in their spare time could, in three years,
catapult health care in China to levels unparalleled elsewhere. In most other countries health care by laymen is considered a
crime. A seventeen-year-old friend of mine was recently tried for having treated some 130 of her high-school colleagues for
VD. She was acquitted on a technicality by the judge when expert counsel compared her performance with that of the U.S. Health Service. Nowhere in the U.S.A. can her achievement be considered "standard," because she succeeded in making retests on all her patients six weeks after their first treatment. Progress should mean growing competence in self-care rather than growing dependence. 5"

America’s commitment to the compulsory education of its young now reveals itself to be as futile as the pretended American commitment to compulsory democratization of the Vietnamese.

"The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand. Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Not to produce what is possible would expose the law of "rising expectations" as a euphemism for a growing frustration gap, which is the motor of a society built on the co-production of services and increased demand."