Illiterate Quotes - Page 8

• The creator of the heavens obeys a carpenter; the God of eternal glory listens to a poor virgin. Has anyone ever witnessed anything comparable to this? Let the philosopher no longer disdain from listening to the common laborer; the wise, to the simple; the educated, to the illiterate; a child of a prince, to a peasant.

  Anthony of Padua

  Wise, Children, Simple

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• A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

  Vladimir Putin

  Country, Civilization, People

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• It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

  Eudora Welty

  Book, Reading, Smell

  One Writer's Beginnings ch. 1 (1983)

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• A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation...the literate and illiterate.

  Jim Trelease

  Home, Choices, Decision

  Jim Trelease (2006). “The Read-Aloud Handbook: Sixth Edition”, p.23, Penguin

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• If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Real, People, Giving

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• The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

  Michael Hastings

  Military, Fighting, Reality

  Michael Hastings (2012). “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan”, p.203, Penguin

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• When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?

  George Lucas

  Writing, College, Thinking

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• It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed.

  Paula Poundstone

  Truth, Women, Book

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• The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

  Walter Benjamin

  Men, Alphabet, Photograph

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• Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.

  John Steinbeck

  Believe, Brain, Trying

  John Steinbeck (2003). “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction”, p.123, Penguin

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• As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Crafts, Crowds

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• My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

  Kirk Douglas

  Mother, Children, Father

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• Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

  Walter Benjamin

  Learning, Photograph, Decipher

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• Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

  Nick Hornby

  Beautiful, Song, Couple

  Nick Hornby (2003). “31 songs”, Viking Books

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• I wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?

  Jerry Seinfeld

  Education, Humor, People

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• 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.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Math, Bad Ass, People

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• One hundred years ago, people were faced with the choice of learning to read or remaining illiterate laborers who would be left behind as have-nots in a rapidly modernizing world. In the coming century, being able to command a world that will be thoroughly computerized will set apart those who can live successfully in the future from those who will be utterly left behind.

  Yishan Wong

  Years, People, Choices

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• The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.

  Fidel Castro

  Ignorance, Weapons, Poverty

  Fidel Castro's speech at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, www.cuba.cu. March 21, 2002.

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• To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.

  Thomas Sowell

  Mean, People, Dollars

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• People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Teacher, Bad Ass, People

  "A Teacher, a Student and a Church-State Dispute". Letter to the New York Times, query.nytimes.com. December 21, 2006.

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