Thomas Sowell Quotes

The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.

I wanted to write rather than do anything else. But 'cause I left school at 15, I didn't know what a noun was, still don't.

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.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

The library is seen as a force for self improvement and the pursuit of knowledge. I fear that in many cases this is no longer true, if it ever was.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

The question is, will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system, or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

So completely had learning decayed in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could apprehend their services in English or even translate a letter from Latin to English... There were so few of them that I cannot recollect a single one South of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.

A school that believes in the power of knowledge and learning will have reading at its core.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

Those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

A fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

My alma mater was books, a good library.

You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

If you can read, you can find books on anything you want. You can self-educate even if you can't afford to go to school.

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.