286 Quotes by Paulo Freire

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.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

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.

For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

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

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

The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of ‘manhood.’

Because the oppressor exists within their oppressed comrades, when they attack those comrades they are indirectly attacking the oppressor as well.

How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation?