The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.

Finally, it is important to make it clear that imagination is not an exercise for those detached from reality, those who live in the air. On the contrary, when we imagine something, we do it necessarily conditioned by a lack in our concrete reality. When children imagine free and happy schools, it is because their real schools deny them freedom and happiness.

Being tolerant does not mean acquiescing to the intolerable; it does not mean covering up disrespect; it does not mean coddling the aggressor or disguising aggression. Tolerance is the virtue that teaches us to live with the different. It teaches us to learn from and respect the different.

It is not systematic education which somehow molds society, but, on the contrary, society which, according to its particular structure, shapes education in relation to the ends and interests of those who control the power in that society.

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

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

This capacity to go beyond the factors of conditioning is one of the obvious advantages of the human person.