Literacy Quotes

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

“Frederick Douglass 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.”
― Carl Sagan

“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.”
― Abigail Adams

“As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Voila! Bookshelves!”
― Jan Karon

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.”
― Frank Serafini

“Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.”
― Art Spiegelman

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.”
― Kofi Annan

“All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle

“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”
― Ambeth Ocampo

“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.”
― L.R.Knost

“If we don’t live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors’ reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the “who is who”, the “what is what” and the “where is Waldo”, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ("Fish for silence.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“من لا يريد القراءة ليس بأفضل ممن لا يستطيع القراءة”
― مارك توين

“To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.”
― George Washington

“It wasn't raindrops at all. It was a great solid mass of water that might have been a lake or a whole ocean dropping out of the sky on top of them, and down it came, down and down and down, crashing first onto the seagulls and then onto the peach itself, while the poor travelers shrieked with fear and groped around frantically for something to catch hold of- the peach stem, the silk strings, anything they could find- and all the time the water came pouring and roaring down upon them, bouncing and smashing and sloshing and slashing and swashing and swirling and surging and whirling and gurgling and gushing and rushing and rushing, and it was like being pinned down underneath the biggest waterfall in the world and not being able to get out.”
― Roald Dahl

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.”
― Kofi Anan

“Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!”
― Jackson Pearce

“Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.”
― L.R. Knost

“Art is literacy of the heart.”
― Elliot Eisner

“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.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”
― Thomas Sowell

“Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

“--You're rather well read for a working-class girl, she said with her back to me.
--Really? I've found that all my well-read friends are from the working class.
--Oh my. Why do you think that is? The purity of poverty?
--No. It's just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment.
--Not in this house.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“A hundred years ago, an average teenager knew countless authors, and, a sex position or two. Today, an average teenager knows countless sex positions, and, an author or two.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana