Paulo Freire

It is only when the oppressed are able to recognize the causes of their oppression that they can begin to change their situation.

The role of the revolutionary is not to 'save' the people, but to struggle with them for their liberation.

The oppressed are not just individuals; they are a class, a collective subject of history.

The oppressor's consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination.

To be truly human is to engage in a dialectical relationship with the world.

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.

Without this love, dialogue is at best a horizontal relationship of two 'I's' who, however, have no more than a superficial, verbal encounter.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them.

Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence.

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

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.

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.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves.

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

The oppressed know that they are oppressed, but they do not know the causes of their oppression.