Paulo Freire Quotes

The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendant

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

The current public aspiration seems to be: Get what you can. Can what you get. Sit on the can behind gated fences.

I hate luxury for luxury's sake. I find it not just brash but societally disruptive. It's just another mechanism of manufacturing discontent by building a thing that most people want but can never have.

There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.

It's a law of life: the tyranny of things.

Greed is the assumption that it is all for my consumption.

There are a lot of things money can't buy. Not one of them is on my son's list.

Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital ... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by ... the sense of having.

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.

The love of money as a possession...will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.

The emptier a person's heart is, the more he or she needs to buy, own, and consume.

This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it

We humans are more concerned with having than with being.

Their property held them in chains...chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul...If they stored up their treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household...They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.