Quotes from Paulo Freire

If I do not love the world, if I do not love life, if I do not love people, I cannot enter into dialogue.

One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men's consciousness.

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

It's in making decisions that we learn to decide.

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.

From the first, the act of conquest, which reduces persons to the status of things, is necrophilia

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from beings so. Attempting to be more human, individually, leads to having more, egotistical, a form of dehumanization.

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. As Weffert points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchical elites and the people. The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed.

Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.

The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.

The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it, this person is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue.

Conditioned by the position of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.

One must seek to live with others in solidarity..only through communication can human life hold meaning.

true discipline does not exist in the muteness of those who have been silenced but in the stirrings of those who have been challenged

El educador ya no es solo el que educa sino aquel que, en tanto que educa, es educado a través del diálogo con el educando, quien, al ser educado, también educa. [...] Nadie educa a nadie, así como tampoco nadie se educa a sí mismo, las personas se educan entre sí con el mundo como mediador.

Oppression is domesticating. The gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.

No hay cambio sin sueño, como no hay sueño sin esperanza.

One does not liberate people by alienating them.

The oppressor shows solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labour — when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.

The teacher who does not respect the student's curiosity in its diverse aesthetic, linguistic, and syntactical expressions; who uses irony to put down legitimate questioning (recognizing of course that freedom is not absolute, that it requires of its nature certain limits); who is not respectfully present in the educational experience of the student, transgresses fundamental ethical principles of the human condition.

Nadie enseña lenguaje a otro. El lenguaje es una invención humana que se hacesocialmente y nadie enseña, todos adquieren el lenguaje, crean el lenguaje. Lo que uno enseña al otro es la gramática. Hasta la Sintaxis en ciertas dimensiones tampoco se enseña, porque la sintaxis de tu análisis es la forma como el pensar se estructura en el discurso.

In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane.

each day be open to the world, be ready to think; each day be ready not to accept what is said just because it is said, be predisposed to reread what is read; each day investigate, question, and doubt.