Paulo Freire

"Humanity cannot be silent; it must speak and act."

"The person is not a thing; the person is a subject of action."

"Every educational situation is a situation of consciousness."

"We become fully human when we embrace our responsibility to others."

"Love and dialogue are the foundations of humanization."

"Education is the practice of freedom, the means by which people deal with their reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

"Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world."

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

"The pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors."

"Conscientization is the deepening of the attitude of awareness which real action for freedom demands."

"Hope is an ontological need."

"We cannot enter the future by the same door by which we entered the present."

"Dialogue cannot exist without humility. How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case of absolute ignorance and the other as informed of everything?"

"The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption."

"A person is not finished with education for as long as they live."

"To speak a true word is to transform the world."

"I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me."

"Love cannot exist without hope; hope cannot exist without love."

"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope."

"Men and women are not finished beings, but unfinished beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality."

"No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by trying to guide them as if they were disabled."

"I think I am, and through my thinking I can transform reality."

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry."

"Cultural invasion is thus an act of violence by which one group's way of life is imposed on another."

"The world is not, but rather is becoming."

"Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order."

"Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality."

"The oppressor is solidified in his position because everything in the world would seem to indicate that his word is law."

"Authentic dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in thinking about reality."

"To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it."