Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people – they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed.
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.
One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men’s consciousness.
P29 – the oppressed, having internalised the image of the oppressor and adopted his guideline are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
P26 – Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.
It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation.