Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.

The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover thatin order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have ben set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.

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.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.