Literacy Quotes

The biggest impact my father had on my life was teaching the importance of literacy.

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.

Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.

Since the age of four, I've been exploring what I can do with the written word: everything from championing literacy and youth voice to raising awareness about world hunger.

The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

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

Education brings sustainability to all the development goals, and literacy is the foundation of all learning. It provides individuals with the skills to understand the world and shape it, to participate in democratic processes and have a voice, and also to strengthen their cultural identity.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Media literacy is not just important, it's absolutely critical. It's going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.

If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.

The improvement of the understanding is for two ends; first, for our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver and make out that knowledge to others.

Typing in all lowercase is popular among young people, SMS users, and anyone who feels literacy has become too time-consuming.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

People are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

Combining the lack of emotional literacy they may be imbued with, with the fact that if you're black you're not supposed to be that smart and if you... as a boy you're not even supposed to like school. All of the sudden you've got kids who are afraid, black kids and Latino kids who are afraid to be great, afraid to bask in the enjoyment of education, lest they be labeled less than black, less than Latino, less they be called the oreo.

A literate world is a possible and desirable one. There are enough resources. What is now needed is the collective will of the international community to ensure that the necessary support is forthcoming.

One thing the humanitarian world doesn't do well is marketing. As a journalist, I get pitched every day by companies that have new products. Meanwhile, you have issues like clean water, literacy for girls, female empowerment. People flinch at the idea of marketing these because marketing sounds like something only companies do.

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

Historically the customs and traditions of day-to-day life in Africa have been dismissed by Western cultural anthropologists as primitive, chaotic, pagan activities that should be replaced by Christianity, the only civilized religion. The West has also long assumed that it should convert tribal cultures to literacy, which is to say an entirely different way of looking at the world, of living in the world. Most Africans who have achieved a comfortable Western lifestyle are Christian. Why? Because it comes with the package: Christian-ity, literacy, and a material lifestyle all come together.

Every citizen's vote should count in America, not just the votes of partisan insiders in the Electoral College. The Electoral College was necessary when communications were poor, literacy was low and voters lacked information about out-of-state figures, which is clearly no longer the case.

The rise of casino capitalism and the punishing state with their vast apparatuses of real and symbolic violence must be also addressed as part of a broader historical and political attack on public values, civic literacy and economic justice. Crucial here is the need to engage how such an attack is aided and abetted by the emergence of a poisonous neoliberal public pedagogy that depoliticizes as much as it entertains and corrupts.

The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

At the 1894 ALA conference it was fairly well agreed that the primary goal of the public library must be to teach good citizenship. Libraries recognized that such "Americanization" could be achieved through literacy. Thus, teaching immigrants to read was not just a benefit in and of itself; literacy would also serve the interests of democracy.

we cannot afford to settle for being just average; we must learn as much as we can to be the best that we can. The key word is education - education with maximum effort. Without it, we cannot be in charge of ourselves or anyone else.

We must have an expansionary vision, one that captures the imagination and diversity of the whole community, one which benefits a nation which has moved beyond the basics of literacy and numeracy and which wants to develop a learning culture.

Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

Art is literacy of the heart

Public schools teaching students to hate America as the left appeases Muslims with "religious literacy training."

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least a moderate education...appears to be an object of vital importance...

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

There is still a desperate need for investment and promotion of education in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Official figures put Pakistan literacy rate over 45%, but in many rural areas we work it is about 10-15%, and for girls even lower.

My work to promote education and literacy in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan has become my life's mission. This takes a full-time commitment 365 24/7.

Creating a world that is truly fit for children does not imply simply the absence of war... It means having primary schools nearby that educate children, free of charge... It means building a world fit for children, where every child can grow to adulthood in health, peace and dignity.

You're not going to get to college - you're not even going to be qualified, even to go to a community college, if you don't address the basic problem of literacy in America. And there's no reason - no reason - for us to have that problem.

Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips.They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading. Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.