Quotes from Paulo Freire

Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.

It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centers of the country. Although these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and promises, usually finds fertile ground here.

I was maybe 19 years old. And I always remember that it was a great feeling of happiness. Because of that, I said to Myles that it's no different for me if I am read­ing poetry or if I am reading Marx. I try to get the beauty in the very act of reading, you see. This is for me something that many times teachers don't try to do.

For the oppressors..to 'be' is to have and to be the class of the "haves".

Although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.

It would be an extremely naive attitude to wait for the ruling classes to develop a form of education that would provide the dominated classes to understand social injustices in a critical way.

The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors.

When a word is deprived of its dimension of action,reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism,into an alienated and alienating "blah". It becomes an empty word that cant denounce the world.

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 into an elitist game, which it calls "realism.

this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person's "depositing" ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be "consumed" by the discussants. Nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth.

Peasants live in a closed reality with a single, compact center of oppressive decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex.

With the insight that genuine literacy involves "reading the word and the world," renowned educator Paulo Freire helped open the door to a broader understanding of the term, one that moves from a strict decoding and reproducing of language into issues of economics, health, and sustainable development

Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.

For the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are "things." For the oppressors, there exists only one right: their right to live in peace, over against the right, not always even recognized, but simply conceded, of the oppressed to survival. And they make this concession only because the existence of the oppressed is necessary to their own existence.

The brutality of racism is something beyond what a minimum of human sensitivity can encounter without trembling, and saying, "Horrible!

I must intervene in teaching the peasants that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my view, a crime against humanity. Therefore, we need to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically.

The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to transmit a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. The more consciously freedom assumes its necessary limits, the more authority it has, ethically speaking, to continue to struggle in its own name.

As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.

La Pedagogía del oprimido, deja de ser del oprimido y pasa a ser la pedagogía de los hombres en proceso de permanente liberación.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

A "hominização" não é adaptação: o homem não se naturaliza, humaniza o mundo. A "hominização" não é só processo biológico, mas também história.

Every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions; it means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided they will always be easy prey for manipulation and domination. Unity and organization can enable them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human.

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside"—inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves.

This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.