“For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking.”

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of …" by Paulo Freire?

Paulo Freire115

educator and philosopher 1921–1997

Related quotes

“The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact.”

Huey P. Newton book Revolutionary Suicide

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 4

“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”

Dean Koontz book Intensity

Source: Intensity

“In separating consciousness from the material world Plato has to ascribe the formative faculty of the mind to consciousness, whereas the formative processes of the human system are largely unconscious, that is, they operate below the dominant processes of the human hierarchy and only come to attention at special moments.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 203

“All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 48

“What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

“So far as consciousness goes, one does one's thinking before one knows what he is to think about.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 397: Cited in: Jay M. Jackson (2013) Social Psychology, Past and Present: An Integrative Orientation, p. 28

“To simply think about the people, as the dominators do, without any self-giving in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to cease being revolutionary leaders.”

Paulo Freire book Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)