Paulo Freire Quotes - Page 2

Sometimes a simple, almost insignificant gesture on the part of a teacher can have a profound formative effect on the life of a student.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information

Love is an act of courage.

I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

To speak a true word is to transform the world.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

People in communion liberate each other.

The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.

Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

No reality transforms itself.

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.

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.

The world is split between those who do not sleep because they are hungry and those who do not sleep because they are afraid of those who are hungry.

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

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.

... 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.

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

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.

Within the word we find two dimensions-reflection and action. If one is sacrificed even in part, the other immediately suffers. To speak a true word is to transform the world.

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.

[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.

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.