"Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

“I don’t want to speak further about education here but only to show how I personally proceeded in trying to discover the origin of this belief, unknown to other societies, that you need an organised institution to make people competent to understand what is good for them and their community, that knowledge does not come from living but from education, the milk of wisdom flowing from the breasts of an institution.”

“Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent — "ei-ei schau-schau!!!" — to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals that depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens' movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers.”

“Christ came to free us from the law, but Christianity allowed the legal mentality to be brought into the very heart of love.”

“As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.”

“The credibility of the world that based itself on citizenship, on responsibility, on power, on equality, on need, claim, and entitlement – the credibility of these as ideals to which it is worthwhile to consecrate your life is declining, and, in my opinion, very fast. I want to suggest the possibility of seeing this as the end of an epoch, just like the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine, and as an entirely new access/credibility/ease of moving into the world of conspiratio, knowing that it can’t be contractually insured, that it’s a renunciation of insurance.”

“List of pointers to Illich's writings”