As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.
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 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.
The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves…
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
P60- one does not liberate people by alienating them. P62- consciousness is the constant unveiling of reality.
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.
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
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.
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.
P69- word is not the privilege of some few persons but the right of everyone
P15 – Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system to the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new “Culture of Silence”.
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.
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 the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
P26 – Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.
P57/8- one must seek to live with others in solidarity..only through communication can human life hold meaning.
P40- this violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped by it.
…to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.
… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…
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.
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.
The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.
To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to being to question: Why?
P20 – The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.
Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed
The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the confidence of the leaders in the people.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.
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.
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.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.