Quotes About Humanity

To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people's stolen humanity, not to "win the people over" to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary's role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people—not to win them over.

Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality, then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity.

Es por esto que [la educación liberadora] reconoce [a las personas] como seres que están siendo, como seres inacabados, inconclusos en y con una realidad que siendo historia es también tan inacabada como ellos. [...] De [la inconclusión de las personas y la conciencia que de ella tienen] que sea la educación un quehacer permanente. Permanente en razón de la inconclusión de los seres humanos y del devenir de la realidad.

no entiendo la existencia humana y la necesaria lucha por mejorarla sin la esperanza y sin el sueño.

The restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so that the latter cannot resume their former position, do not constitute oppression . An act is oppressive only when it prevents men from from being more fully human... Behaviour which prevents the restoration of the oppressive regime cannot be compared with the acts by which few men deny the majority their right to be human.

On the other hand, you know that it's possible to do more. You cannot accept being immobilized because you think that you've finished. You experience the very nature of being a human being-that is, unfinished, constantly in search.

eu gosto de ser humano, porque, inacabado, eu sei que sou um estafador, mas, ciente do incompleto, eu sei que posso ir mais longe.

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming,. Human beings are not built in silence,3 but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

Hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it. The dehumanization resulting from an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice.

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.

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

To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

A nós, gente, só foi dada essa maldita capacidade, transformar amor em nada.

it is the same Atman that is present in all bodies, irrespective of their castes?

No one can find inner peace except by working, not in a self- centered way, but for the whole human family.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.