Nat Turner Quotes

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to 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!!!!

Any white person who shall assemble with slaves, or free negroes ... for the purpose of instructing them to read or write, ...shall be punished by confinement in the jail ... and by fine. .

Reading is more important than writing.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

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

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.

There's definitely a value in being literate.

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

All the youth ..., who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it be set to learn ... until they are able to read English writing well.

The cornerstone of education is an easy system of reading and writing. The hey to this is the new Turkish alphabet based on the Latin script.

If a white teach a free negro or a slave to write he is fined $500, and imprisoned at the discretion of the Court; if the offender be a colored man, bond or free, he may be fined or whipped at the discretion of the Court

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.

Freedmen have the natural thirst for knowledge, aspire to power and influence… coupled with learning, and are excited by the special study of books.

I cannot remember not being able to read.

I like to read and understand.

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.

If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

You can't write if you don't read.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.