Paulo Freire

P46- As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they fatalistically "accept" their exploitation.

P33- Oppression is domesticating. Gravest obstacle to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

P71- if i do not love the world if i do not love life if i do not love people i cannot enter into dialogue.

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

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.

P60- one does not liberate people by alienating them. P62- consciousness is the constant unveiling of reality.

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

The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...

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 an educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

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.

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a __uick return to power,_ forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible __ialogue_ with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls __ealism.__anipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution_One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.

It is not systematic education which somehow molds society, but, on the contrary, society which, according to its particular structure, shapes education in relation to the ends and interests of those who control the power in that society.

Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.

The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.

P20 - The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.