Literacy Rates Quotes

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.

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.

People who lived in the 1920s and '30s and '40s were not so different from us. In some ways, they were probably better citizens than we are. They had longer attention spans, for example. Educated people tended to read a bit more than we did.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

Nearly everywhere Buddhism went, there had been a higher level of literacy, even in miserable Burma, not to mention Thailand and Sri Lanka.

One of the things that amazes me is the amount of functional illiteracy in this country... people can't read to get around, or people who can't read the newspaper but can barely read street signs.

Too many of our children cannot read. Reading is the building block, and it must be the foundation for education reform.

Unfortunately, a lot of kids don't read anymore. I don't know what we can do about that.

The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.

If more people could read, write, and comprehend, we could be much closer to solving so many of the other problems our country faces today.

I don't really care how people read. I care if people read.

The fact that we don't read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I hope someday we can stamp out illiteracy in America. Of course you'll have to kill alot of my relatives to do it.

There is very little difference between one who cannot read and one who will not read.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it's increasingly girls, not boys, who don't know how to read.

Human progress lags most in societies in which illiteracy is highest, above all in Islamic countries and Africa.

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

If Russians knew how to read, they would write me off.