Paulo Freire Quotes

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

The natural course of power is to make the many slaves to the few.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors…. The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood/

A lot of people think that intersectionality is only about identity. But it's also about how race and gender are structured in particular workforces.

The games I'm playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences. It's about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it's not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes, it's actually embodying it.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

It is one thing to own a woman, and it is another to have her within the bonds of an excellent mastery.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

When you're the single French person in the middle of 10 Tunisians, the majority will impose their way of life on the minority.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes.