literacy impact Quotes

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

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 always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

What the world of tomorrow will be like is greatly dependent on the power of imagination in those who are learning to read today.

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

Over no nation does the press hold a more absolute control than over the people of America, for the universal education of the poorest classes makes every individual a reader.

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

If I had been literate, I wouldn't have sold drugs. I just wanted a job. I would have worked at McDonald's. And I would have put the same effort into the fries and mopping the floor that I would have put into drugs. I'm the kind of person that always wants to do a job the best I can. I don't believe in half-doing jobs.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

The charms of women were never more powerful never inspired such achievements, as in those immortal periods, when they could neither read nor write.

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