Top 180 Paulo Freire Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “With the insight that genuine literacy involves “reading the word and the world,” renowned educator Paulo Freire helped open the door to a broader understanding of the term, one that moves from a strict decoding and reproducing of language into issues of economics, health, and sustainable development.”

— Paulo Freire

102. “The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.”

— Paulo Freire

103. “The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given – something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.”

— Paulo Freire

104. “This capacity to go beyond the factors of conditioning is one of the obvious advantages of the human person.”

— Paulo Freire

105. “The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of ‘correct thinking.’”

— Paulo Freire

106. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

107. “To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.”

— Paulo Freire

108. “It’s no sin to make a critical study of Brazil’s reality. A small percentage own land. Most people don’t.”

— Paulo Freire

109. “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence.”

— Paulo Freire

110. “Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

— Paulo Freire

111. “I must intervene in teaching the peasants that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my view, a crime against humanity. Therefore, we need to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically.”

— Paulo Freire

112. “The brutality of racism is something beyond what a minimum of human sensitivity can encounter without trembling, and saying, “Horrible!”

— Paulo Freire

113. “Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.”

— Paulo Freire

114. “One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.”

— Paulo Freire

115. “The more people participate in the process of their own education, and the more people participate in defining what kind of production to produce, and for what and why, the more people participate in the development of their selves. The more people become themselves, the better the democracy.”

— Paulo Freire

116. “In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point.”

— Paulo Freire

117. “The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”

— Paulo Freire

118. “It is not suprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings.”

— Paulo Freire

119. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

120. “Coherently democratic authority carries the conviction that true discipline does not exist in the muteness of those who have been silenced but in the stirrings of those who have been challenged, in the doubt of those who have been prodded, and in the hopes of those who have been awakened.”

— Paulo Freire

121. “The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity;.”

— Paulo Freire

122. “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence – but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.”

— Paulo Freire

123. “Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue.”

— Paulo Freire

124. “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of the students.”

— Paulo Freire

125. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

126. “The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.”

— Paulo Freire

127. “Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.”

— Paulo Freire

128. “One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. As Weffert points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchical elites and the people. The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed.”

— Paulo Freire

129. “In order for the oppressed to unite they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature.”

— Paulo Freire

130. “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

— Paulo Freire

131. “It is not possible to remake this country, to democratize it, humanize it, make it serious, as long as we have teenagers killing people for play and offending life, destroying the dream, and making love unviable. If education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either.”

— Paulo Freire

132. “Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not live the world – if I do not love life – if I do not love people – I cannot enter into dialogue.”

— Paulo Freire

133. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

134. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

135. “The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”

— Paulo Freire

136. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

137. “One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.”

— Paulo Freire

138. “I am dealing with people and not with things. And, because I am dealing with people, I cannot refuse my wholehearted and loving attention, even in personal matters, where I see that a student is in need of such attention.”

— Paulo Freire

139. “I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.”

— Paulo Freire

140. “The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and to be liberated, with the people – not to win them over.”

— Paulo Freire

141. “Submission to suffering is a form of annihilation, but transformation of suffering rekindles a faith that gives life.”

— Paulo Freire

142. “A fact which is not denied but whose truths are rationalized loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver.”

— Paulo Freire

143. “The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.”

— Paulo Freire

144. “Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture.”

— Paulo Freire

145. “But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.”

— Paulo Freire

146. “Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.”

— Paulo Freire

147. “Just as it is important in Latin America to discuss ideas that come from North America, I think it is interesting for North Americans to discuss ideas that come from Latin America or Africa and do not insert themselves into capitalist interests.”

— Paulo Freire

148. “To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.”

— Paulo Freire

149. “Any attempt to treat people as semihumans only dehumanizes them...”

— Paulo Freire

150. “In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls “realism.”

— Paulo Freire