Paulo Freire Quotes

Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed
Paulo Freire
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
Paulo Freire
P20 - The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.
Paulo Freire
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?
Paulo Freire
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
Paulo Freire
Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
Paulo Freire
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
Paulo Freire
The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
Paulo Freire
To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.
Paulo Freire
… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…
Paulo Freire
...to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.
Paulo Freire
P40- this violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.
Paulo Freire
P57/8- one must seek to live with others in solidarity..only through communication can human life hold meaning.
Paulo Freire
P26 - Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
Paulo Freire
The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
Paulo Freire
P29 - the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
Paulo Freire
P15 - Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".
Paulo Freire
P69- word is not the privilege of some few persons but the right of everyone
Paulo Freire
P46- As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.
Paulo Freire
P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.
Paulo Freire
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.
Paulo Freire
P71- if i do not love the world if i do not love life if i do not love people i cannot enter into dialogue.
Paulo Freire
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
Paulo Freire
The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.
Paulo Freire
P60- one does not liberate people by alienating them. P62- consciousness is the constant unveiling of reality.
Paulo Freire
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...
Paulo Freire
The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What an educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
Paulo Freire
One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.
Paulo Freire
In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.
Paulo Freire
As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.
Paulo Freire