Thomas Cahill Quotes

The reason is that till date, in spite of advances in information technology and strategies of information, the written word in the form of books still remains one of humanity's most enduring legacies.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

The importance of education is ingrained in Scottish history.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

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

We must bring it to pass ... if we have the peace that all the youth now in England, born of free men who have the means that they can apply to it, may be devoted to learning ... until such time as they can read well what is written in England.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

… a barbarian who could not write one sentence of grammar.

Russian literacy in the early twentieth century remained below 33 percent—lower than that of Great Britain in the eighteenth century.

Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

Literacy is the most basic currency of the knowledge economy.

A native of America who cannot read or write is . . . as rare as a comet or an earthquake.

I never read books - and still don't read books - to develop them.

I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.

Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.