DeWitt Clinton Quotes

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.

Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established.... Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants and women have neglected it altogether.... There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person .... Hereafter ... every man shall, of his own accord, subordinate all other matters to the education of his children.

When people are educated, class distinction disappears.

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard.

There are nearly one billion illiterate people on Earth.

All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

Promoting education is an effort that is close to my heart. Illiteracy contributes to poverty; encouraging children to pick up a book is fundamental.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

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

The thing I like most about books is that anybody can afford them. They have an innate valuelessness.

You can rule ignorance; you can manipulate the illiterate; you can do whatever you want when a people are uneducated, so that goes in line with corrupt business and corrupt politics.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

The knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many.... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land.

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.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

I don't believe in reading. I don't care about reading. It means nothing to me. I believe that by using your eyes and ears, you'll find everything that there is, and you don't have to read about it.

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

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.

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.

In Liverpool, where I live, we have a brilliant library which has been refurbished, and I like going there.

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

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none ... ZERO.