Paulo Freire Quotes

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

Language usage always has a political context.

Among poor people, there's not any question about women being strong -- even stronger than men -- they work in the fields right along with the men. When your survival is at stake, you don't have these questions about yourself like middle-class women do.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

He was from a different class, too poor, and they would never approve if their daughter became serious with someone like him.

The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

Nearly all inmates are drawn from the ranks of the powerless and the poor. A child of privilege frequently receives the benefit of the doubt; a child of poverty seldom does.

We decided that our first job was to help the schools serving the children from the very lowest income groups. Those families constitute the number one burden, the number one burden in this Nation on the school systems.

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class.

Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person's social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.