The theater itself is not revolutionary: it is a rehearsal for the revolution.

It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.

When does a session of The Theatre of the Oppressed end? Never - since the objective is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is precisely for these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life.

Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.

Nothing is going to remain the way it is. Let us, in the present, study the past, so as to invent the future.

The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!