Top 100 Paulo Freire Quotes
#1. 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
#3. Submission to suffering is a form of annihilation, but transformation of suffering rekindles a faith that gives life.
Paulo Freire
#4. Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be it must become. Its "duration" (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of opposites permanence and change.
Paulo Freire
#5. He was a teacher with good thinks of the life and education but he espress with a sentence.
Paulo Freire
#6. One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.
Paulo Freire
#7. 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
#8. Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming.
Paulo Freire
#9. 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
#10. It's really not possible for someone to imagine himself/herself as a subject in the process of becoming without having at the same time a disposition for change. And change of which she/he is not merely the victim but the subject.
Paulo Freire
#11. ... Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle ...
Paulo Freire
#12. 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
#13. P46- As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.
Paulo Freire
#14. P21 the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it, this person is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue.
Paulo Freire
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.
Paulo Freire
#18. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.
Paulo Freire
#19. There is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been taught.
Paulo Freire
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. If i am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, i must make use of every possibility there is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in practices consistent with it.
Paulo Freire
#23. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him/herself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.
Paulo Freire
#24. The road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust.
Paulo Freire
#25. 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
#26. Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.
Paulo Freire
#27. The former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed.
Paulo Freire
#28. 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
#29. No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.
Paulo Freire
#30. 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
#31. Some may think that to affirm dialogue - the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world - is naively and subjectively idealistic. there is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.
Paulo Freire
#32. 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
#33. Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are the components of the praxis of domination.
Paulo Freire
#34. P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.
Paulo Freire
#35. 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
#36. At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.
Paulo Freire
#37. P15 - Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "Culture of Silence".
Paulo Freire
#38. P60- one does not liberate people by alienating them.
P62- consciousness is the constant unveiling of reality.
Paulo Freire
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Studying is a preparation for knowing; it is a patient and impatient exercise on the part of someone whose intent is not to know it all at once but to struggle to meet the timing of knowledge.
Paulo Freire
#44. The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors." "They call themselves ignorant and say the 'professor' is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen." "Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.
Paulo Freire
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.
Paulo Freire
#49. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.
Paulo Freire
#51. 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
#52. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.
Paulo Freire
#53. 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
#54. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
Paulo Freire
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.
Paulo Freire
#58. P68- 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
#59. Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.
Paulo Freire
#60. Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.
Paulo Freire
#61. P17 - Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.
Paulo Freire
#62. 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
#63. Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
Paulo Freire
#64. The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
Paulo Freire
#65. It is not suprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings.
Paulo Freire
#66. When we live our lives with the authenticity demanded by the practice of teaching that is also learning and learning that is also teaching, we are participating in a total experience ... In this experience the beautiful, the decent, and the serious form a circle with hands joined.
Paulo Freire
#67. The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves ...
Paulo Freire
#68. 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
#69. The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.
Paulo Freire
#70. 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
#71. Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.
Paulo Freire
#72. P57- the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.
Paulo Freire
#73. 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
#74. Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.
Paulo Freire
#75. It's no sin to make a critical study of Brazil's reality. A small percentage own land. Most people don't.
Paulo Freire
#76. There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
Paulo Freire
#77. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?
Paulo Freire
#78. Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.
Paulo Freire
#79. What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?
Paulo Freire
#80. 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
#81. The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
Paulo Freire
#82. One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.
Paulo Freire
#83. 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
#84. No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).
Paulo Freire
#85. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.
Paulo Freire
#86. Liberation is a praxis : the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.
Paulo Freire
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.
Paulo Freire
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.
Paulo Freire
#93. This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.
Paulo Freire
#94. 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
#95. If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed
Paulo Freire
#96. The educator has the duty of not being neutral.
Paulo Freire
#97. P40- this violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.
Paulo Freire
#99. Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality.
Paulo Freire
#100. For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority.
Paulo Freire
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