To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.

Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause--the cause of liberation.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.

Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.

Education as the practice of freedom--as opposed to education as the practice of domination--denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education.