Top 180 Paulo Freire Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.”

— Paulo Freire

152. “One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men’s consciousness.”

— Paulo Freire

153. “The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to transmit a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. The more consciously freedom assumes its necessary limits, the more authority it has, ethically speaking, to continue to struggle in its own name.”

— Paulo Freire

154. “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”

— Paulo Freire

155. “It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.”

— Paulo Freire

156. “A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”

— Paulo Freire

157. “Certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation.”

— Paulo Freire

158. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

159. “Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.”

— Paulo Freire

160. “P26 – Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”

— Paulo Freire

161. “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors.”

— Paulo Freire

162. “No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?”

— Paulo Freire

163. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

164. “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands – whether of individuals or entire peoples – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”

— Paulo Freire

165. “Peasants live in a closed reality with a single, compact center of oppressive decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex.”

— Paulo Freire

166. “It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centers of the country. Although these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and promises, usually finds fertile ground here.”

— Paulo Freire

167. “He was a teacher with good thinks of the life and education but he espress with a sentence.”

— Paulo Freire

168. “P29 – the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.”

— Paulo Freire

169. “One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.”

— Paulo Freire

170. “To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that it is necessary to be the “owner of one’s own labor,” that labor “constitutes part of the human person,” and that “a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself” is to go a step beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize women and men.”

— Paulo Freire

171. “Each, however, as he revolves about “his” truth, feels threatened if that truth is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not “his” truth a lie.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

173. “Conditioned by the position of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

175. “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.”

— Paulo Freire

176. “Every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions; it means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided they will always be easy prey for manipulation and domination. Unity and organization can enable them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human.”

— Paulo Freire

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

— Paulo Freire

178. “As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.”

— Paulo Freire

179. “Any situation in which A objectively exploits B or hinders his pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is an act of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.”

— Paulo Freire

180. “Oppression – overwhelming control – is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life.”

— Paulo Freire

181. “The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor – when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.”

— Paulo Freire

182. “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth. Those who undergo it must take on a new form of existence; they can no longer remain as they were.”

— Paulo Freire

183. “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

— Paulo Freire

184. “I have a right to be angry, to show it and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle, just as I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle because I live in history at a time of possibility and not of determinism.”

— Paulo Freire

185. “Actually, what the rejected ones need – those forbidden to be, prevented from being – is not our tepidity but our warmth, our solidarity – yes, and our love, but an unfeigned love, not a mistrustful one, not a soppy love, but an ‘armed’ love.”

— Paulo Freire

186. “An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.”

— Paulo Freire