Quotes About Literacy

One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

We often speak of creating an environment for reading, a reading climate.

They would also read and be read to – silent reading was regarded as highly suspect, a sign of being antisocial or melancholy, suitable only for scholars.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

It's a bad case o' the thinkin' he's caught, missus. When a man starts messin' wi' the readin' and the writin' then he'll come doon with a dose o' the thinkin' soon enough. I'll fetch some o' the lads and we'll hold his heid under water until he stops doin' it, 'tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin'.

Bad spelling can be lethal.

As I am sure some of you know, I boast of the fact that for a couple of years I was a volunteer librarian, working weekends for no more reward than a cup of tea, a sweet biscuit, and a blind eye to the enormous number of books that I was taking home.

I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.

When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.

No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light…

Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one's intellectual development. There is nothing to compare with it, since very few people (Helen Keller is the great exception) can remember what it meant for them to learn to speak.

READING SHOULD NOT BE PRESENTED TO CHILDREN AS A CHORE OR A DUTY. IT SHOULD BE OFFERED TO THEM AS A PRECIOUS GIFT.

environmental quality is higher where income is more equitably distributed, where more people are literate, and civil and political rights are better respected. It's people power, not economic growth persay, that protects local air and water quality. Likewise, it is citizen pressure on government and companies for more stringent standards, not the mere increase in revenue that compels industries to switch to cleaner technologies.

In this country, we kept slaves from learning to read. Additionally, for a while in our history, you were adequately literate if you could simply sign your name—or even just make an X. In developing countries today, girls are still educated less than boys. What do these situations suggest about the potential power of reading?

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you

Dile a un niño que no le gusta leer y te creerá.

The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn't fails.

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

she was five years old and got her first library card, which to a bookish little girl was like a religious experience.

Would we still have a "democracy" if you needed to pass a test of economic literacy to vote? If you needed a college degree? Both of these measures raise the economic understanding of the median voter, leading to more sensible policies. Franchise restrictions were historically used for discriminatory ends, but that hardly implies that they should never be used again for any reason. A test of voter competence is no more objectionable than a driving test.

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era—but nobody guessed, back then, that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.