The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.
The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.
No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority.
Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.
It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished.
To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.
Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue.
Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.
Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.
To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.
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.
Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.
Indeed, some “revolutionaries” brand as “innocents,” “dreamers,” or even “reactionaries”; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation – the process of humanization – is not another deposit to be made in men.
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.
The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
The road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust.
The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of ‘manhood.’
One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.
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.