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Notes -
There are a number of things wrong with the quotation in the PDF. First off, the source material (though not your own quotation!) misspells the author as “Friere.” Second, the cited book is not in the bibliography. Third, the language in the quotation (English) is wrong. It should be Spanish, as this work was first published in Spanish translation in Mexico.* Finally, the statement is too pithily set forth to be the author’s own words (in whatever language).
In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quotation.
Its existence is perpetuated by the academic need to hang every insight with clout in the field, no matter how banal, on a academic theorist. Feire’s writings basically make this point, albeit in a roundabout form that is rather inconvenient to quote properly. More careful academics will not attribute this phrase as a direct quotation (as does the author in the PDF). Interesting, this paraphrase is not original to the PDF author, so it cannot really be unquoted either. Thus, it is not surprising that the paraphrase gets misrepresented as an actual quote and this apocryphal citation gets cribbed from source to source, because it efficiently does the academic work it needs to do.
It’s not “two seconds” to check a source: you’ve already spent more time on it than that. And it still has not been checked. No one has pulled up the 1968 original edition, which doesn’t seem to be online and does not seem to be stocked in North American academic libraries. So how is an academic to handle it? Well, most would check the edition they do have at hand to find a page they can cite and, failing that, they assume that their peer-reviewed source got the cite to the inaccessible edition correct and they simply reproduce that. They might get more skeptical if the quotation seemed wrong, but it does encapsulate what the guy is trying to say.
Plus, the sentiment seems to assume that critical theorists’ writings are found in a single source (“the damn source”). Actually, it’s a confusing mess. Their publication histories are inevitably complex, being reprinted and republished multiple times, in multiple editions, multiple languages, and even multiple (discordant) translations. Most academics just cite the reader or book they have in their personal libraries. In this situation, differences are sure to happen and they are tolerated, because it’s a pain to check whether a quotation in some other edition is correct. And it’s tolerated because these critical thinkers stand for their ideas more than their words. There’s no citational archeology to find the original statement in the original edition and the original language. It’s not the Bible.
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