It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for humanization they also accept, from that moment, their total responsibility for the struggle.

Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.