Top 180 Paulo Freire Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”

— Paulo Freire

52. “It doesnt hurt to repeat here the statement, still rejected by many people in spite of its obviousness, that education is a political act.”

— Paulo Freire

53. “This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.”

— Paulo Freire

54. “Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.”

— Paulo Freire

55. “Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.”

— Paulo Freire

56. “Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.”

— Paulo Freire

57. “It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished.”

— Paulo Freire

58. “For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority.”

— Paulo Freire

59. “Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.”

— Paulo Freire

60. “The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.”

— Paulo Freire

61. “It’s in making decisions that we learn to decide.”

— Paulo Freire

62. “How can I be an educator if I do not develop in myself a caring and loving attitude toward the student, which is indispensable on the part of one who is committed to teaching and to the education process itself.”

— Paulo Freire

63. “People in communion liberate each other.”

— Paulo Freire

64. “Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.”

— Paulo Freire

65. “Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.”

— Paulo Freire

66. “What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?”

— Paulo Freire

67. “The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.”

— Paulo Freire

68. “Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.”

— Paulo Freire

69. “The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.”

— Paulo Freire

70. “Being tolerant does not mean acquiescing to the intolerable; it does not mean covering up disrespect; it does not mean coddling the aggressor or disguising aggression. Tolerance is the virtue that teaches us to live with the different. It teaches us to learn from and respect the different.”

— Paulo Freire

71. “The world is split between those who do not sleep because they are hungry and those who do not sleep because they are afraid of those who are hungry.”

— Paulo Freire

72. “I am an educator who thinks globally.”

— Paulo Freire

73. “Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.”

— Paulo Freire

74. “Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood.”

— Paulo Freire

75. “Indeed, some “revolutionaries” brand as “innocents,” “dreamers,” or even “reactionaries”; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation – the process of humanization – is not another deposit to be made in men.”

— Paulo Freire

76. “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

— Paulo Freire

77. “The road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust.”

— Paulo Freire

78. “No reality transforms itself.”

— Paulo Freire

79. “The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.”

— Paulo Freire

80. “To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.”

— Paulo Freire

81. “Teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.”

— Paulo Freire

82. “It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

84. “The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.”

— Paulo Freire

85. “The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.”

— Paulo Freire

86. “The multitude is always in the wrong.”

— Paulo Freire

87. “It is not systematic education which somehow molds society, but, on the contrary, society which, according to its particular structure, shapes education in relation to the ends and interests of those who control the power in that society.”

— Paulo Freire

88. “Educators need to know what happens in the world of the children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it.”

— Paulo Freire

89. “This is the sense in which I am obliged to be a listener. To listen to the student’s doubts, fears, and incompetencies that are part of the learning process. It is in listening to the student that I learn to speak with him or her.”

— Paulo Freire

90. “It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for humanization they also accept, from that moment, their total responsibility for the struggle.”

— Paulo Freire

91. “How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I am closed to – and even offended by – the contribution of others? At the point of encounter there are neither yet ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.”

— Paulo Freire

92. “The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover thatin order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have ben set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

95. “No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

97. “As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.”

— Paulo Freire

98. “The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.”

— Paulo Freire

99. “It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.”

— Paulo Freire

100. “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”

— Paulo Freire