Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life: Jiddu Krishnamurti on Freedom, Self-Understanding, and Mature Love

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life: Jiddu Krishnamurti on Freedom, Self-Understanding, and Mature Love

“Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is.

I think that will be enough, won't it?”
― J. Krishnamurti

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
― J. Krishnamurti

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

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed”
― Paulo Freire

“Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”
― Paulo Freire

“language is never neutral”
― Paulo Freire

“One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

“The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves...”
― Paulo Freire

“The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.”
― Paulo Freire

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“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.”
― Paulo Freire

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“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.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti