Ida B. Wells Quotes

Learning to read and write changes lives; it means jobs, money, health, and dreams fulfilled.

There are many problems, but I think there is a solution to all these problems; it's just one, and it's education.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

Boosting education will be a direct counterbalance to Boko Haram's appeal. In particular we must educate more young girls, ensuring they will grow up to be empowered through learning to play their full part as citizens of Nigeria and pull themselves up and out of poverty.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

What We want is to make it possible for our unfortunate people to live a life of industry for it is by steady work alone that we hope for our physical and moral rehabilitation. For this reason above all we have undertaken to rally our people around our ideal.

Let people have an education and you can't stop them.

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

The goal of my Foundation is to give young people a chance to better themselves and establish a base for a successful future.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

I can tell you I didn't feel good when I could not articulate properly. Getting my GED was important and I want other women to feel that.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

When you don't educate the people, you're crippling them. You are, you're not giving them ways to survive.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

And I see the - you know, when I go to the juvenile detention centers and prisons, I see people who can't read now. And I know that when they leave those prisons and those detention centers, they're not going to be able to make it in our society.

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

It was a shock to visit a Job Corps camp and see adults who had been through some years of our public education system stare at a blackboard where a teacher was writing CAT or helping them write their own names. In another room men were learning to tell time.

Give education and knowledge to the common people.

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 am an advocate of education. It is the panacea for all that ails us in our society.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.