Paulo Freire Quotes

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

The findings in contemporary social sciences are helping us understand that we can find other ways to educate people and act against injustice and corruption in our society.

But how can you speed up the transformation of society in a country as large as Russia? Those sounding the moral outcry are the ones who are trying to dictate their standards from the outside. Of course, that isn't the right way to go either. One cannot impose democracy from the other side of national borders, which is something we ourselves experienced during the communist era. The West's policies toward Eastern Europe, the Helsinki process - none of that really helped us.

We are going to be working very hard on the inner cities having to do with education, having to do with crime. We're going to try and fix as quickly as possible.

About the state of black America, I've been working on that for many, many years. And [Donald Trump] said certain things in his early days about wanting to do something about it. We have a lot of violence in our neighborhoods now. We need education. And we need jobs. Is what I'm trying to say.

the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.

I believe that the only true agents of change on a large scale, in this country or anywhere, are young people.

The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

I titled my book "Revolution." And that is exactly what it is. France is experiencing a time of transformation - in education, on the labor market and in the pensions system. We're talking about a cultural revolution.

Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.

I founded the King Hussein Foundation after my husband's death in 1999, to build on his humanitarian vision and legacy in the country and abroad, through programs promoting education and leadership, economic empowerment, tolerance, cross-cultural dialogue, and media that enhances mutual understanding and respect among different cultures across conflict lines.

We wanted to bring attention to the fact that we had so many deals taking place that we could have made change for the better for all people, and we felt that we would be a catalyst to bring this to attention to society.

If my goal is to change Colombia, which it is because I really think Columbia has to change in many, many ways - I think it has to be a very profound, nearly spiritual maturing process in the Colombian society because I think you have to first be aware of what's happening and it's not easy because many people don't want to see what's happening.

We can change the world one thought at a time, one child at a time, one family at a time, one community at a time, one city, one state and one country at a time.

Why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? [James] Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream - or out of the nightmare.

Even small efforts to bring about a change in the social fabric eventually reap large fruits.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.

There's a lot of things that need to change, a lot of different issues that need to be addressed.

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.

Of course, in our country, developing in a region with somewhat conservative traditions, women were desperately needed to be more engaged - socially, economically, politically.

A revolution in itself is not a blessing.

I do think that our culture or our psyche as a country I guess, the world or whatever, we're due for a huge event. We're due for a little bit of a revolution or a spotlight or a movement. Something that feels large, something that feels like the 60s. Some sort of unification.