Paulo Freire Quotes

Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it.

As a military child I first learned how to deal with different types of people and how to deal with order.

Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.

It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child.

Early on, my emotional work had to do with feeling unheard and invisible. My parents divorce at six, when I was six, really affected me. We moved around and I was with my mom and my sister. I have learned, by the way, there were amazing gifts that came out of that. For one, I'm living my childhood dream. I feel very fortunate.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

I wasn't attractive, I wasn't very verbal, I wasn't very smart in school. I wasn't anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going... I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical... I just knew it.

Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one's own interest in the topic has waned.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.

I majored in Psychology in college. I was going to be a child psychologist.

Usually the bullies are the most insecure. I was bullied and it's hard, you feel like high schools never going to be over. Its four years of your life and you just have to remember the person picking on you has their own problems and their own issues. And you're going to be ok.

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.

Life is not about focusing on the obstacles. It's about how you handle them, and whether you get enlightenment or levity from the way you do it

Cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience, and begin to learn, with humility and patience, the lessons that are set for your ultimate perfection.

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

Sixty-five percent of Americans don't have the conversation with their children. So you're sending off boys and girls off to college, off to high school, off to wherever they go, and nobody's had the conversation about how to conduct themselves. About a man telling his son how to be a man. How to respect a woman. How do you respect yourself?

Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

Even in the hardest circumstances, dreams can give you the courage to live, and I hope I can share that message with children in need.

Dream of a world where poverty is history, dream of a world where we don't spend those obscene billions on arms, knowing full well that a tiny fraction of those budgets of death would ensure that children everywhere had clean water to drink, could afford the cheap inoculations against preventable diseases, would have good schools, adequate healthcare and decent homes.

One of our urgent opportunities is to respond to a child when he earnestly asks, remembering that they don't always ask.

"Religion" can no more be equated with what goes on in churches than "education" can be reduced to what happens in schools or "health care" restricted to what doctors do to patients in clinics. The vast majority of healing and learning goes on among parents and children and families and friends, far from the portals of any school or hospital. The same is true for religion. It is going on around us all the time. Religion is larger and more pervasive than churches.

Ultimately, what really matters is not just the experiences you have at a young age, but whether or not you are equipped-by your parents, by your genetics, by your education-to survive and deal with them.