Paulo Freire famous quotes

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

#Self #World #Born

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 impressed 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

#Reality #Views #World

Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue.
-- Paulo Freire

#People #Requirements #Dialogue

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information
-- Paulo Freire

#Information #Cognition #Liberating

Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.
-- Paulo Freire

#Men #Reflection #Order

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.
-- Paulo Freire

#Profound #People #World

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

#People #Decision #Leader

This is the road I have tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and being sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me from bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher.
-- Paulo Freire

#Teacher #Art #Educational

If I am a pure product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in the world and, therefore, it is not possible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.
-- Paulo Freire

#Determination #Mean #Responsibility

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

#Peace #Honesty #Powerful

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.
-- Paulo Freire

#Manipulation #Individual #Appetite

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

#Reality #People #World

There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
-- Paulo Freire

#Educational #Philosophy #Teaching

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.
-- Paulo Freire

#Reflection #Names #People

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

#World #Banking #Assumption

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

#Teacher #Students #Contradiction

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them';
-- Paulo Freire

#Lying #Consciousness #Situation

Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.
-- Paulo Freire

#Learning #Reflection #Understanding

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

#Learning #Hopeful #Inquiry

I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.
-- Paulo Freire

#Teacher #Who I Am

What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?
-- Paulo Freire

#Life #What If #Way

Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
-- Paulo Freire

#Teaching #Teach

No reality transforms itself.
-- Paulo Freire

#Educational #Philosophy #Reality

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.
-- Paulo Freire

#Educational #Philosophy #Communication

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

#Lying #Fighting #Hands

If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed
-- Paulo Freire

#Doe #Permit #Structure

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

#Teacher #Students #Term

Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.
-- Paulo Freire

#Reading #Soul #Grasping

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.
-- Paulo Freire

#Fighting #Reality #Knowing

… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…
-- Paulo Freire

#Real #Struggle #Identity

Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.
-- Paulo Freire

#Men #Decision #Violence

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

#Mean #Past #Understanding

The multitude is always in the wrong.
-- Paulo Freire

#Originality #Conformity #Multitudes

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...
-- Paulo Freire

#Freedom #Historical #Tasks

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

#Reality #Men #Tangible

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

#Educational #Views #People

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity 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

#Educational #Learning #Creativity

The road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust.
-- Paulo Freire

#People #Revolution #Mistrust

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.
-- Paulo Freire

#Objectivity #Subjectivity

In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both
-- Paulo Freire

#Struggle #Order #Humanity

To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them.
-- Paulo Freire

#Ideas #Study

To speak a true word is to transform the world.
-- Paulo Freire

#World #Speak

The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
-- Paulo Freire

#Leader #Community #Favors

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

#Teacher #Teaching #Mean

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

#Destiny #Order #Historical

To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.
-- Paulo Freire

#Lying #People #Silence

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

#Men #Ideas #Quests

The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'
-- Paulo Freire

#Models #Oppressed #Manhood

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.
-- Paulo Freire

#Exercise #World #Students

The revolutionary's role is to liberate, and to be liberated, with the people--not to win them over.
-- Paulo Freire

#Winning #People #Roles

language is never neutral
-- Paulo Freire

#Language

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

#Teacher #Communication #Reality

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.
-- Paulo Freire

#Teacher #Reflection #Reality

It's no sin to make a critical study of Brazil's reality. A small percentage own land. Most people don't.
-- Paulo Freire

#Reality #Land #People

The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
-- Paulo Freire

#Doe #Behavior #Guidelines

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

#Struggle #Book #Humanity

No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.
-- Paulo Freire

#Discipline #Tolerance #Society

... teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from which results machinelike memorization, which I have already criticized. Critical study correlates with teaching that is equally critical, which necessarily demands a critical way of comprehending and of realizing the reading of the word and that of the world, the reading of text and of context.
-- Paulo Freire

#Teaching #Reading #Learning

Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.
-- Paulo Freire

#Mean #Excess #Definitions

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

#Dream #Country #Teenager

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

#Hurt #People #Political

With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.
-- Paulo Freire

#Would Be #Violence #Oppression

It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.
-- Paulo Freire

#Would Be #Contradiction #Term

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

#Class #Facts #Defense

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming.
-- Paulo Freire

#Men #Becoming #Problem

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

#Burning #Building #Treats

The parent-child relationship in the home usually reflects the objective cultural conditions of the surrounding social structure. If the conditions which penetrate the home are authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the climate of oppression. As these authoritarian relations between parents and children intensify, children in their infancy increasingly internalize the paternal authority.
-- Paulo Freire

#Children #Philosophy #Educational