Quotes About Literacy

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

Given a choice of weapons with you sir, I should choose grammar.

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award

There's no fool?like an illiterate fool.

Literacy is a right, not a privilege.

Libraries are a tremendous and valuable resource, and I'm note sure it's possible to have too many of them.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed.

And so he learned to read. From then on his progress was rapid.

As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.

For people who had been prohibited from learning to read and write as slaves, reading offered tangible proof that they were really free.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Since many—too many—of our children's values and attitudes are formed by the mass media, every parent ought to offer an informal multiyear course in media literacy.

Students will become good readers when they read more. Students will read more when they enjoy reading. They will enjoy reading when they enjoy their reading material. They will enjoy their reading material when they are left to choose it themselves, and to delve into it on their own terms.

Encourage your children to read more and watch television less.

So instead of watching TV, we read every night together as a family.

I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.

Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Second graders learn to read: that's a perfect time to make them code.

Anyone should be able to read comics.

Comics have always helped people to read. A lot of people learned to read by reading the comics. And it's our livelihood, after all. If people don't know how to read, they're not reading our comics.

Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

I'm really grateful I grew up in a house in which media literacy was a survival skill.