Quotes from Paulo Freire

The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.

It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information

It doesnt hurt to repeat here the statement, still rejected by many people in spite of its obviousness, that education is a political act.

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of the students.

The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.

It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.

No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue.

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves.

Education is freedom. Education will teach you how to do it yourself as opposed to asking someone else to do it for you. And around it our own town... Freemanville!

The future isn't something hidden in a corner.The future is something we build in the present.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.

The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

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.

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.