QUOTATIONS
"People will be truly critical if they live in the plentitude of the praxis, that is, if their action encompasses a critical reflection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from a purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level, one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality."
—Paulo Freire
"When we look back at history... it is important to resist the temptation to view all events as part of an inexorable chain of causality leading inevitably to the present.... we must reconsider that time before the sit-ins swept the South, before the founding of the SNCC, before the Freedom Riders rolled through Dixie, before Albany and Birmingham and Selma etched their mark on human history... when the course of events still might have gone quite differently."
—Timothy B. Tyson
"Racism is a man-made, man-enforced phenomenon... when people live in a society where such things are formally and informally taught and learned, and are practiced, it is inescapable that the ideology of racism does become a functional institution, organically interwoven with every other ideology and institution of that society."
—George Jackson
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
—Ecclesiastes
"Leadership is action, not position."
—Donald H. McGannon
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
—Langston Hughes
I obviously do not refer to the silence of profound meditation, in which men only apparently leave the world, withdrawing from it in order to consider it in its totality; and thus remaining with it. But this type of retreat is only authentic when the meditator is "bathed" in reality; not when the retreat signifies contempt for the world and flight from it, in a type of "historical schizophrenia."
—Paulo Freire
I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love. For me, the revolution, which is not possible without a theory of revolution and therefore science is not irreconcilable with love. On the contrary: the revolution is made by people to achieve their humanization. What, indeed, is the deeper motive which moves individuals to become revolutionaries, but the dehumanization of people? The distortion imposed on the word "love" by the capitalist world cannot prevent the revolution from being essentially loving in character, nor can it prevent the revolutionaries from affirming their love of life. Guevara (while admitting the risk of seeming ridiculous) was not afraid to affirm it: "Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality"
—Che Guevara
"You know I've proclaimed for a long time: we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly."
—Mao Zedong
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
—Frederick Douglass
The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
—Frederick Douglass
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
—Frederick Douglass
"Our cultural workers must serve the people with great enthusiasm and devotion, and they must link themselves with the masses, not divorce themselves from the masses. In order to do so, they must act in accordance with the needs and wishes of the masses. All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. . . . There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them."
—Mao Zedong
Thus, it is not the limit-situations in and of themselves which create a climate of hopelessness, but rather how they are perceived by women and men at a given historical moment: whether they appear as fetters or as insurmountable barriers. As critical perception is embodied in action, a climate of hope and confidence develops which leads men to attempt to overcome the limit-situations. This objective can be achieved only through action upon the concrete, historical reality in which limit-situations historically are found. As reality is transformed and these situations are superseded, new ones will appear; which in turn will evoke new limit-acts.[Professor Alvaro Vieira Pinto analyzes with clarity the problem of "limit-situations", using the concept without the pessimistic aspect originally found in Jaspers. For Vieira Pinto, the "limit-situations" are not "the impassable boundaries where possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin"; they are not the frontier which separates being from nothingness, but the frontier which separates being from nothingness but the frontier which separates being from being more."]
—Paulo Freire
"There is a way of brining up a child of a samurai. From the time of infancy one should encourage bravery and void trivially frightening or teasing the child. If a person is affected by cowardice as a child, it remains a lifetime scar."
—Yamamoto Tsunetomo
"O Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds,
I come to you as one of your many children.
I need your strength and your wisdom.
Make me strong not to be superior to my brother,
but to be able to fight my greatest enemy:
"Myself"
The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky,
The rhythm of the sea, speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning,
the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me.
The strength of the fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun,
and the life that never goes away, they speak to me
And my heart soars.
"How long have I known you, oh Canada? A hundred years? Yes, a hundred years. And many many 'seelanum" more. And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land.
For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. I have known you in your streams and rivers where your fish flashed and danced in the sun, where the waters said come, come and eat of my abundance. I have known you in the freedom of your winds. And my spirit, like the winds, once roamed your good lands.
But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe.
When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed this way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority.
My nation was ignored in your history textbooks - they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, when I drank you fire water, I got drunk -- very, very drunk. And I forgot.
Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this Centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? Fore the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what's past and gone.
Oh, God in Heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden Chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on.
Oh, God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success---his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. Before I follow the great Chiefs who have gone before us, oh Canada, I shall see these things come to pass.
I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedom of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest and proudest in the proud history of our tribes and nations."
—Chief Dan GeorgeI have sat many hours
on the steps outside my house,
and while I have whittled
I tasted nature
and felt her trhob of life.
Yet the strangers walking by
thought me lazy.
We all wander through life
united by the bond of creation
and become brothers
through gratitude.
We have much to be thanksful for.
Let each of us
talk to the Supreme Being
in his own way.
A man who cannot give thanks
for the food he eats
walks without the blessings of nature.
Once people knew how to live in harmony,
now the silence of nature
reaches few.
There are many who look,
but only some who see.
The earth is holy, the feet that walk on it are blessed.
If the legends fall silent,
who will teach the children
of our ways?
When a man sits down in quietness
to listen to the teachings of his spirit
many things will come to him
in knowledge and understanding.
We have been so much luckier
because we never needed to communicate
in any other way than by thought or word.
This alone will no longer be possible.
We have diminished in numbers and paid
for our past with sorrow and pain
of which no generation of native people
is without its share.
We have suffered much, now we stand to lose all
unless we preserve whatever is left
from the days of our ancestors.
To do this, the spoken word is not enough.
When a though forms
it needs much time to grow.
Silence between spoken words
has always been the sign of deliberation.
In these new times of a modern world
where everything has become of value
silence has become time.
Time unused has become time wasted.
We are told: 'Time is money'.
It is harder to find somebody
who will listen, but everybody reads.
Therefore we must write about our ways,
our beliefs, our customs, our morals,
how we look at things and why,
how we lived, and how we live now.
To do this, we need the old and the young.
Soon there will be many books
that will tell of our ways
and perhaps will shame even those
who think us inferior
only because we are different.
To those who believe in the power
of the written word these books
will proclaim our cultural worth.
It has been done so for other races
and their teachings.
This is how our young people
will bring to you the true image
of our native people
and destroy the distortion
of which we have been the victims
for so long.
Then we will prosper in all things.
From our children will come those braves,
who will carry the torches to the places <
where our ancestors rest.
There we will bow our heads
and chant the song of their honor.
This is how the void will be filled
between the old and the new ways.
—Chief Dan George