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.
The multitude is always in the wrong.
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.
The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and to be liberated, with the people – not to win them over.
The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...
Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of the students.
One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.
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.
Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.
Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.
It is not possible to remake this country, to democratize it, humanize it, make it serious, as long as we have teenagers killing people for play and offending life, destroying the dream, and making love unviable. If education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either.
Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.
Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.
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.
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.
I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.