Michael Morpurgo Quotes

My trademark at CNN was really asking insightful questions and making sure people are understanding the connections in humanity, and I think that is the core of education.

I try to be a good human being and keep up with what's going on in the world by reading and staying in touch with the current events.

Educate yourself: Read up on current events and books.

I want my kids to go and see the world and understand they are privileged, but it doesn't mean they don't have the right to speak up and see what is happening.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

The world is not ideal, and the only weapon we can give our children is information. Information which is not pretty, but honest.

The classroom should be an entrance into the world, not an escape from it.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

I feel sometimes that in children's books there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

It's so important for people to pay attention to history and learn from it, because it's the only thing we've got that's going to help us figure out where we are going. Especially the way things are manipulated in the press today. You have to sort through so much stuff to figure out what is real and what is not. It gets harder every day.

Given the news we all read or hear about, it's actually made me a stronger parent - I'm not a 'helicopter parent,' but I am very aware of local and world events and want to teach them what's right and wrong.

I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.

I have always been into reading serious material.

I have been working with UNICEF Peru a lot. I am aiming to educate children, mostly because once adults reach adulthood, your views are shaped. With children, you can really teach them, you can open their eyes to what is really going on. The only way we can open their eyes and free them is by educating them.

I grew up in a household where we talked about the state of the world over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I never wanted to be current in the sense that I follow the news, I follow the historical moment of the day. It was always, for me, to go back to the fundamentals.

I'd just like to see athletes awake. And aware. There's so much going on and so much to know... We stay in our little boxes and don't think much about the outside world.

What I think of sometimes, as I read the new books - do kids really need to see such a seamy side of life? I'm in the minority, such an old woman, perhaps. I love the books that have given kids joy, that give them hope at the end. Sometimes it seems to me the books right now are very depressive.

There are some things that are more appropriate to a children's than an adult book but there's a huge overlapping area and most kids read an age group up anyway.

Educate yourself on what's going on around the world where children are dying. Educate yourself on what's going on in Africa.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

I think there is an obligation on the part of all of us to stay informed and aware.

You have to tell your children about the world they live in, about the discrepancies, about the things that don't work… So you have to bring it up with a scientific orientation so they learn to ask questions, and learn how to say the most difficult thing in the world: 'I don't know'.