Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

If fathers wish to educate their daughters beyond what is customary, for want of trained older women and on account of the extreme negligence which has become women's sad lit, since well-educated older women are unavailable, they are obliged to bring in men teachers to give instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, playing musical instruments, and other skills…. As a result of this, many fathers prefer leaving their daughters in a barbaric, uncivilized state to exposing them to an evident danger such as familiarity with men breeds. All of which would be eliminated if there were older women of learning

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

To read too many books is harmful.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with.

The great threat to the young and pure in heart is not what they read but what they don't read.

I'm not a library.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

I'm not well read.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket--and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them read, would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading; which, to do well as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning. Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about, in the full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

You could not let your masters see you read; but now [after Emancipation] the colored people are fond of sending their children to school. Because the children in after years will be able to tell us ignorant ones how to do for ourselves.

Books are the greatest weapons against the assholes of the world.

Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.