"Any attempt to treat people as semihumans only dehumanizes them."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Paulo Freire quotes (page 7 of 9)
178 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'"
Read quote
6 likes
"Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors."
Read quote
6 likes
"Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world."
Read quote
6 likes
"Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Education is suffering from narration sickness."
Read quote
6 likes
"Education as the practice of freedom--as opposed to education as the practice of domination--denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it."
Read quote
6 likes
"The former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Whether the teacher is authoritarian, undisciplined, competent, incompetent, serious, irresponsible, involved, a lover of people and of life, cold, angry with the world, bureaucratic, excessively rational, or whatever else, he/she will not pass through the classroom without leaving his or her mark on the students."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
5 likes