35 Quotes Tagged: literacy

We awaken by asking the right questions.

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

من لا يريد القراءة ليس بأفضل ممن لا يستطيع القراءة

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War — when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.

People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.

When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

"<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18943.Frederick_Douglass" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Frederick Douglass">Frederick Douglass</a> taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path."

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.

Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.

If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort?