From Towards a History of Needs by Ivan Illich
"The peculiarly modern inability to use personal endowments, communal life, and environmental resources in an autonomous way infects every aspect of life where a professionally engineered commodity has succeeded in replacing a culturally shaped use-value. The opportunity to experience personal and social satisfaction outside the market is thus destroyed. I am poor, for instance, when the use-value of my feet is lost because I live in Los Angeles on the thirty-fifth floor."
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Services, Hospitality and ...Stories and Reflections by Lee Hoincaki
"I am "free" a good part of the day ... for example, in the moments right after waking up in the morning ... while walking to the office each day, and back at night. And there are many other times during the day when I am doing "nothing," or when I could easily take time out for a prayer ... a prayer for those who have no shelter, for those who would benefit from a kindly stranger; and to pray for light and strength: that I might see how to live offering rather than receiving hospitality, that I might have the courage to do this."
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To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich
"If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as 'good,' a 'sacrifice' and 'help.'
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