Quotes About Literacy

Sigils, as I recall from some dark comic book series, are symbols of medieval magic from back in the day when so few people were literate that literacy itself was seen as borderline magical. A man who could read was considered a genius. A man who could read without moving his lips was proclaimed either divine or demonic, depending on the agenda of whoever was doing the proclaiming.

A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.

A library is an arsenal of liberty.

Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.

I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.

Educated mothers are 50 percent more likely to immunize their children than mothers with no schooling.

The fervor for establishing public schools in Massachusetts found no counterpart in Virginia, where illiteracy was much higher and education was largely restricted to those wealthy enough to afford to have their own children educated at home by tutors. In Virginia, the printing press was deliberately restricted by the powers that be, to keep reading matter from the masses, while the aristocracy often had impressive libraries in their homes.

Specifically, Kahan identified "scientific curiosity." That's different from scientific literacy. The two qualities are correlated, of course, but there are curious people who know rather little about science (yet), and highly trained people with little appetite to learn more.

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would "spoil the best nigger in the world," and "unfit him to be a slave.

Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery's consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.

Literacy was power.

Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn't read.

If you can't count they can cheat you. If you can't read they can beat you.

Of particular interest were those printed in the nineteenth century when my grandfather spent his few minutes at school.

Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing.

Nurture children with a book, it helps to give them confidence and opens up their world.

Impressed deep in the psyche of America, the most literate society ever founded, was the idea that you could improve yourself—morally, philosophically, financially—through the written word.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, remix ideas, quote experts, and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.