Paulo Freire Quotes

...language is never innocent.

Language usage always has a political context.

Technology is not neutral.

The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

We are never half so interesting when we have learned that language is given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Nobody that I know really likes the feeling of having no power and not being able to influence people. But most of us aren't too conscious of what we are trying to do and get that control and that power so people end up sort of playing all kinds of unconscious manipulative games or they're sort of half aware, they have an idea of a strategy or goal they want to use and they think about it. But then in the heat of the moment, it kind of all flies out the window.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle

Isolation from power makes men look for a mob in which they can be strong.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

One paire of eares drawes dry an hundred tongues.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

The power of association is stronger than the power of beauty; therefore, the power of association is the power of beauty.