Top 100 Quotes About Illiteracy
#1. No one ever went to prison because of bad grammar, but the prisons are full of people who are there because of emotional illiteracy.
Gay Hendricks
#2. Illiteracy is a form of slavery!" he would cry. "We can't waste time blaming anyone. We need to become obsessed with teaching people to read!
John Corcoran
#3. Illiteracy is a huge problem in America. One in three adults in our country is illiterate.
Roseanne Barr
#4. I want to wage war against illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, unfair competition, communitarianism, delinquency.
Nicolas Sarkozy
#5. Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.
Daniel Berrigan
#6. If literacy was natural, the word 'illiteracy' would not exist.
T.K. Naliaka
#7. 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.
Mary McCarthy
#8. There i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president of my political lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy.
Gerald Kaufman
#10. As part of the National Strategy, the Government should commit itself to the virtual elimination of functional illiteracy and innumeracy.
May-Britt Moser
#11. Ignorance is a knowledge illiteracy.
Toba Beta
#12. Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
Barbara Kingsolver
#13. Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.
Mal Peet
#14. Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H.G.Wells
#15. The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
Bruce Jackson
#16. There's much talk about how there can't be democracy in a region that has problems of illiteracy and poverty. But I bring a different idea to the table when I say, 'Guys, I come from India. I'm more optimistic coming from where I'm coming.'
Bobby Ghosh
#17. Those who depend on television as their primary information source are condemned to ... A form of political illiteracy.
Bill Kraus
#18. The creation of conditions by which an entire people who have lived in exploitation and illiteracy gains access to the highest levels of knowledge and creativity is one of the most beautiful achievements of a revolution.
Roberto Fernandez Retamar
#19. Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.
John Waters
#20. Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.
John F. Kennedy
#21. As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.
Naveen Jain
#22. Olson's Maximus and Zukofsky's 'A' are too symbolically and verbally complex, respectively, to command large audiences especially in an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.
Guy Davenport
#23. Why would you apologize for what you read for pleasure? Just think of the illiteracy rate. Every book read for pleasure should be celebrated. And novels that celebrate love, commitment, relationships, making relationships work, why isn't that something to be respected?
Nora Roberts
#24. The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
Milton Friedman
#25. You can blame people and situations for your misery, hunger, deprivation and illness, but you are the only person can be blamed for your illiteracy.
M.F. Moonzajer
#26. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation of the mind for future work, hence men should be educated with special reference to the work.
Timothy Thomas Fortune
#27. Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time - more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.
Charles A. Murray
#28. It is my desire to break the destructive generational cycle of illiteracy in the home by focusing on the children. Reading to your child has so much value as a parent because it opens the lines of communication.
Victoria Osteen
#29. Baltimore's slogan was 'The City that Reads', but like the rest of its one million or so inhabitants Lori knew that was a pipedream; the city had one of the lowest literacy rates in the country, and along with illiteracy went a lack of morals.
Stephen Leather
#30. The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.
Carl Sagan
#31. I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.
Neil Gaiman
#32. Financial illiteracy is like being in a rain storm and trying to jump in between the raindrops ... eventually it all catches you at the same time.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#33. LOL could go and take a running jump. I wasn't made for illiteracy; it simply didn't come naturally.
Gail Honeyman
#34. I know that, throughout the world, there are good men and women concerned with the greatest challenges facing society today - poverty, illiteracy, and disease.
Nelson Mandela
#35. It is environmental illiteracy and a complete lack of forward thinking to ignore the need to halt and then reverse population growth in the context of climate change, travel congestion, unaffordable housing, and resource depletion
Phil Harding
#36. The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy ... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own
Amartya Sen
#37. Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.
Maya Angelou
#38. Yes and I appreciate it. But this is going to be difficult enough without running my words through a filter of illiteracy.
Kevin Hearne
#39. We are here because we share a fundamental belief: that poverty, illiteracy, disease and inequality do not belong in the twenty-first century. We share a common purpose: to eradicate these ills for the benefit of all. And we share a common tool to achieve this: the Millennium Development Goals.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
#40. There is a triangular relationship between poverty, child labour and illiteracy who have a cause and consequence relationship. We will have to break this vicious circle.
Kailash Satyarthi
#41. I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.
Ken Jennings
#42. In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra Pound
#43. No less characteristic in a democracy is social justice. This demands a solution to the frightening indexes of infant mortality, of malnutrition, lack of education illiteracy, wages not sufficient to sustain life
Rigoberta Menchu
#44. Monolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21st century!
Greg Roberts
#45. The hall-mark of American humour is its pose of illiteracy.
Ronald Knox
#46. Building a godly life on the sand of scriptural illiteracy is impossible.
Edwin Louis Cole
#48. Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#49. In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy ... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.
Harlan Ellison
#50. Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
#51. A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.
George Steiner
#52. Hatred, intolerance, poor hygienic conditions and violence all have roots in illiteracy, so we're trying to do something to help the poor and the needy.
Abdul Qadeer Khan
#54. The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia
#55. Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease ... We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism ... We advance.
Melvin B. Tolson
#56. I will use the rest of my life to help the poor overcome the problems confronting them - poverty is the greatest challenge facing humanity. That is why I build schools; I want to free people from poverty and illiteracy.
Nelson Mandela
#57. Taking money from job creating entrepreneurs and giving it to ever-failing government programs has to be the ultimate in economic illiteracy.
James Cook
#58. I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.
Milton Friedman
#59. Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#60. If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Danny Glover
#61. The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world ...
Henry Giroux
#62. Mass illiteracy is India's sin and shame and must be liquidated.
Mahatma Gandhi
#63. Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.
Karen Black
#64. People power must be combined with good governance to bring about real, deep and lasting change. This combination can achieve almost everything from eliminating corruption to ending malnutrition and illiteracy.
Narendra Modi
#65. The laws you see today are a direct consequence of economic illiteracy in the general population. If every voter learned economics tonight, the laws would change tomorrow.
Ben Mathew
#66. There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.' ...
Peter Greenaway
#67. Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.
Bernhard Schlink
#68. My father was a civil servant in northern India where I was born. As a boy I saw the dire effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially on women and children. It often seemed that the only thing separating me from them was luck.
Naveen Jain
#69. Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs, if they can have no shelter, if illiteracy and disease continue to dog them.
Nelson Mandela
#70. As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.
Nursultan Nazarbayev
#71. Again and again, universities have put a low priority on the very programs and initiatives that are needed most to increase productivity and competitiveness, improve the quality of government, and overcome the problems of illiteracy, miseducation, and unemployment.
Derek Bok
#72. Illiteracy and stupidity are not quite different statuses; they are both the outcome of our lethargy and indolence.
M.F. Moonzajer
#73. This generation must get deadly serious about the problem of Biblical illiteracy.
Albert Mohler
#74. To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.
Timothy Noah
#75. Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.
Bill Bryson
#76. A dog's best friend is his illiteracy.
Ogden Nash
#77. Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
#78. She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou
#79. As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too.
Maya Schenwar
#80. Sri Yukteswar showed no special consideration to those who happened to be powerful or accomplished; neither did he slight others for their poverty or illiteracy. He would listen respectfully to words of truth from a child, and openly ignore a conceited pundit.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#81. Sensitivity to the immense needs of humanity brings with it a spontaneous rejection of the arms race, which is incompatible with the all out struggle against hunger, sickness, under-development and illiteracy.
Pope John Paul II
#83. Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.
Angela Davis
#84. From now on, how one arrives at a definition of the relationship of man's basic nature to his culturally conditioned control systems (extensions) is of crucial importance. For in our shrinking globe man can ill afford cultural illiteracy.
Edward T. Hall
#85. Better to lose a book to a child, than to lose a child to illiteracy.
Richard Allington
#86. Just as people will admit to being bad with math more than they will admit illiteracy, business tolerates interpersonal incompetence where it would never allow financial malfeasance.
Rodd Wagner
#87. Promoting education is an effort that is close to my heart. Illiteracy contributes to poverty; encouraging children to pick up a book is fundamental.
Sasha Grey
#88. Never before has man had such a great capacity to control his own environment, to end hunger, poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and human misery. We have the power to make the best generation of mankind in the history of the world.
John F. Kennedy
#89. My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.
Maya Angelou
#90. A political system seeking to function amongst ignorant, illiterate and barbaric people could have marvelous principles but could only succeed in being ignorant, illiterate and barbaric unless one addressed the people one by one and cured the ignorance, illiteracy and barbarism of each citizen.
L. Ron Hubbard
#91. I hope that as a totally literate human being that you don't even know what "illiteracy" is because it simply doesn't exist in your world.
Peter Davis
#92. Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.
Kailash Satyarthi
#93. I hope someday we can stamp out illiteracy in America. Of course you'll have to kill alot of my relatives to do it.
Jeff Foxworthy
#94. The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.
George W. Bush
#95. I have a vision of India: an India free of hunger and fear, an India free of illiteracy and want.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
#96. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
Peter S. Jennison
#97. To the uneducated an A is just three sticks.
A.A. Milne
#98. I want to read
so I can read the Koran
read the signs in the street
know the number of the bus
I'm supposed to take
when I one day leave this house.
Eve Ensler
#100. I blinked at her, suddenly loathing her to the depths of my soul. Not only was she probably rather evil, and definitely thoroughly unpleasant, but she also didn't read.
Nicole Peeler
