Paulo Freire Quotes

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

At a certain point in their existential experience, the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration.

The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'

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.

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

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

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Emasculation does seem to be a theme in the roles that I choose.

If you have been put in your place long enough, you begin to act like the place.

Then came the conquest. We were conquered people, our hearts set on surviving in some small way on a continent that had become Anglo-Saxon.

Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

If we fail to see that there are powers that cause people to be bowed down in bondage, we are going to fight the wrong battle.

To repress rebellion is to maintain the status quo, a condition which binds the mortal creature in a state of intellectual or physical slavery. But it is impossible to chain man merely by slaving his body; the mind also must be held, and to accomplish this, fear is the accepted weapon. The common man must fear life, fear death, fear God, fear the Devil, and fear most the overlords, the keepers of his destiny.

Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.

The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors." "They call themselves ignorant and say the 'professor' is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen." "Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.

Slavery holds few men fast; the greater number hold fast their slavery.

It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.

I guess that is the strange part of the human brain that people have studied for eons - is hatred and self-hatred. You can convince people that the problem is not coming from the top but is, rather, being created by the people who are being oppressed.

A lot of authority figures want to be good. I sense that, and yet at the same time I sense that authority, after a while, always leads to some kind of oppression. When the minority report comes in, what you do is run the minority out of town with a flaming cross. It's just the way things are.

Those that have so much power over others as to be able to oppress them have seldom so much over themselves as not to oppress.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

I think what all of us have in common is that we've been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That's a core reason why women do not have power in the world.