Paulo Freire Quotes

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

I don't care if your world is ending today because I wasn't invited to it anyway.

It's strange, because it seems that society is kind of promoting or nurturing this kind of ostracized existence. People are kind of very much in their own little worlds.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

Loneliness is the leprosy of the modern world.

Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.

Humans are almost always lonely.

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

I haven't found one place in the world yet where I could disappear.

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.

When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.

We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.

You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too.

I guess...on one hand, I spent way too much time watching science fiction and reading science fiction when I was growing up. But a part of it is I also never felt much of a connection to the world in which I lived while I was growing up, and so, oddly enough, I think I felt a lot more connected to the worlds that I read about in science fiction.

The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation.

The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

Dena had always been a loner. She did not feel connected to anything. Or anybody. She felt as if everybody else had come into the world with a set of instructions about how to live and someone had forgotten to give them to her. She had no clue what she was supposed to feel, so she had spent her life faking at being a human being, with no idea how other people felt. What was it like to really love someone? To really fit in or belong somewhere? She was quick, and a good mimic, so she learned at an early age to give the impression of a normal, happy girl, but inside she had always been lonely.