Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.

Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

The world is split between those who do not sleep because they are hungry and those who do not sleep because they are afraid of those who are hungry.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

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.

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

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.