literacy importance Quotes

Reading is a mighty engine, beside which steam and electricity sink into insignificance.

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

I think it's extremely important that children are exposed to reading.

I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these." - Mr. Darcy

We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000.

I think my grandmother Woodrell was most responsible for my becoming a writer. She wasn't quite literate, but was very proud that she attended school as far as the third grade. She worked as a maid, housekeeper and cook.

Men who cannot read are the mercy of a few men who are interested in self more than in good government. The country is the sufferer; for the effect of one ballot is felt to the utmost extremity of the body politic; it touches every industry and trade, it accelerates or retards the wheels of commerce, and fills the avenues of trade with life and general activity such as is found in no other country.

Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.

My mother insisted that her children read.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.

It is very important to be reading as well as writing. A doctor is not going to ignore new surgery practices.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

I've just always been a reader. My grandmother just expressed the importance of literacy, if I said that correctly. She just always expressed the importance of being able to write and being able to read.

He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

If you can instill a love of reading in your children, they will be ahead of the curve at school and in their lives in general. Their imaginations will be stimulated. I thank heavens for the father that gave me that to begin with.

As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.

To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.

I want other kids to see the joy in reading and literacy and how, if you read about things, they become so much closer, and if you're willing to put in the effort and time and passion, you can really understand them.