286 Quotes by Paulo Freire

Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply “blah, blah, blah, ” and practice, pure activism.

Liberation – not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.

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