Top 180 Paulo Freire Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Education is freedom.”

— Paulo Freire

2. “Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage.”

— Paulo Freire

3. “If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed.”

— Paulo Freire

4. “Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.”

— Paulo Freire

5. “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause – the cause of liberation.”

— Paulo Freire

6. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

7. “Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.”

— Paulo Freire

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8. “I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.”

— Paulo Freire

9. “Only through communication can human life hold meaning.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

11. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

13. “The educator has the duty of not being neutral.”

— Paulo Freire

14. “Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.”

— Paulo Freire

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15. “It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.”

— Paulo Freire

16. “Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.”

— Paulo Freire

17. “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.”

— Paulo Freire

18. “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.”

— Paulo Freire

19. “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”

— Paulo Freire

20. “Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.”

— Paulo Freire

21. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

22. “Love is an act of courage.”

— Paulo Freire

23. “Education is suffering from narration sickness.”

— Paulo Freire

24. “To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them.”

— Paulo Freire

25. “Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”

— Paulo Freire

26. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

27. “Dialogue cannot exist without humility.”

— Paulo Freire

28. “In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

30. “Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”

— Paulo Freire

31. “Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”

— Paulo Freire

32. “No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.”

— Paulo Freire

33. “Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.”

— Paulo Freire

34. “A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education.”

— Paulo Freire

35. “There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”

— Paulo Freire

36. “No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”

— Paulo Freire

37. “To speak a true word is to transform the world.”

— Paulo Freire

38. “There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.”

— Paulo Freire

39. “Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.”

— Paulo Freire

40. “In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well.”

— Paulo Freire

41. “If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings.”

— Paulo Freire

42. “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.”

— Paulo Freire

43. “It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.”

— Paulo Freire

44. “Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”

— Paulo Freire

45. “I hope at least that the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”

— Paulo Freire

46. “In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform.”

— Paulo Freire

47. “Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.”

— Paulo Freire

48. “Within the word we find two dimensions-reflection and action. If one is sacrificed even in part, the other immediately suffers. To speak a true word is to transform the world.”

— Paulo Freire

49. “Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming.”

— Paulo Freire

50. “One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.”

— Paulo Freire