Top 100 Quotes About Illiterate
#1. It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy?
Koichiro Matsuura
#2. 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
#3. Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.
Michel De Montaigne
#4. I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.
Chuck Close
#5. There are not many designers who are truly creative and literate. Most are self-indulgent, illiterate, fashion-mongering, service people trying to bridge a message between a product and an audience.
Ivan Chermayeff
#6. If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
Chinua Achebe
#7. National antipathy is the basest, because the most illiberal and illiterate of all prejudices.
Jane Porter
#8. Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.
Benito Mussolini
#9. I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
Abraham Verghese
#10. On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.
Edward Luce
#11. 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
#12. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated of illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not.
John Grogan
#13. I'm thirteen years old, and I'm somewhat overweight. Meaning: I'm dead and fat. Meaning: I'm a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker. Just ask my mom. I'm thirteen and fat - and I will stay this way forever. And yes, I know the word ulcerate. I'm dead, not illiterate.
Chuck Palahniuk
#14. Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so.
Robertson Davies
#15. The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
J.M. Roberts
#16. There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
Walt Whitman
#17. All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
Roger Bacon
#18. To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#19. 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
#20. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
Mohsin Hamid
#21. [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.
John Desmond Bernal
#22. A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.
John Grogan
#23. A new study shows that American students are becoming less proficient in science, and if the trend continues, we will become a nation that's science and chemistry illiterate. And you thought a lot of meth labs are blowing up now?
Jay Leno
#24. Have you ever noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It's a puzzle, isn't it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.
Aravind Adiga
#25. Because so many voters happen to be illiterate, India invented the party symbol, so that voters who could not read the name of their candidate could vote for him or her anyway by recognizing the symbol under which they campaigned.
Shashi Tharoor
#27. The mass migration of the poorest of the poor to America is bad for the whole country, but it's fantastic for Democrats. Ask yourself: Which party benefits from illiterate non-English speakers who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for, but can be instructed to learn certain symbols?
Ann Coulter
#28. During another argument, Gene snapped at Peter: "Peter, you're an illiterate idiot who can't read or even talk correctly and never finished school." "Yeah," said Peter, "and I'm in the same band as you." To this day, that remains the smartest thing I ever heard Peter say.
Paul Stanley
#29. Sixty-six percent is the literacy rate in the Arab world. We have 58 million illiterate among adults in our part of the world.
Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned
#30. We see all around the world where women's rights are denied, where governments don't believe in educating their girls. There are 800 million people in the world who are illiterate and 75 percent of them are women and girls.
Laura Bush
#31. The Boxer Rebellion is a war that was fought on Chinese soil in the year 1900. The Europeans, the Japanese and their Chinese Christian allies were on one side. On the other were poor, starving, illiterate Chinese teenagers whom the Europeans referred to as the Boxers.
Gene Luen Yang
#32. We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. None. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background.
David McCullough
#33. I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
Paul Farmer
#35. 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
#36. I never learned to read girls. I guess I'm girl-illiterate.
Robert Schell
#37. American teens have the worst of all worlds ... Our children are bombarded and confronted with sexual messages, sexual exploitation, and all manner of sexual criticism. But our society is by and large sexually illiterate.
Faye Wattleton
#38. Today I still feel like the most illiterate person ever to have roamed the campuses of Wellesley and Harvard, where I later transferred. I remain intimidated by all the books I haven't read, but over the years I've come to realize that being a student is a lifelong adventure.
Elisabeth Shue
#39. Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.
Jeffrey Archer
#40. 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
#41. Have you been reading those books that clueless illiterate Duja in charge of the lending library lets you borrow?' 'No, Ma.' 'Then what put you in mind of devils possessing nuns to take over the church?
Renita D'Silva
#42. Many who have read Marxist books have become renegades from the revolution, whereas illiterate workers often grasp Marxism very well.
Mao Zedong
#43. Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen.
P. J. O'Rourke
#44. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.
Alan Moore
#45. I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it. That way they won't find out.
Mike Birbiglia
#46. Where is the true religion? It is where women, men, youth, children, elderly, the illiterate and the educated are all attracted.
Dada Bhagwan
#47. I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.
Orhan Pamuk
#48. I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate.
David Mumford
#49. [The POUM] posters, designed for a wider public (posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population).
George Orwell
#50. For crying out loud, Baker, what rock have you been living under? Oh, yeah, you're from Kansas. He said it as if Kansas were in some remote tribal region inhabited by illiterate natives like the ones in my National Geographic magazines.
Clare Vanderpool
#51. It's a great lesson in modesty that you realize you're illiterate in a field that you think you're an expert in.
Wim Wenders
#52. Dogs get after big living. They seem illiterate of worry, yet able to read joys that elude us. They quietly shout to us: Wag your backside to music instead of your tongue to malice.
Michael Cogdill
#53. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.
Paul Theroux
#54. 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, illness, poverty or hunger.
Fidel Castro
#55. The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
Aleister Crowley
#56. This is not just primitive rural superstition; [juju] is practiced by all kinds of people, from illiterate herd boys to multi-dregreed university professors. If you don't understand the power of this belief, you will never truly grasp the rich albeit often incomprehensible spirituality of Africa.
Lawrence Anthony
#57. My only model for being a father was my father, an illiterate on the margin of society.
Gerard Depardieu
#58. Newspapers ... give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details ...
Oscar Wilde
#59. My innocent eyes are illiterate, teach them some mischief. They're complete idiots, teach them some signs.
Myself
#60. I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children.
George W. Bush
#61. The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.
William Blum
#62. That educated didn't mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.
Octavia E. Butler
#63. I am a illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.
John McCain
#65. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Walter Lippmann
#66. Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#67. 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
#68. Judge not lest ye be judged" has become the battle cry not only for biblically illiterate secularists, but for professing evangelicals as well. Postmodern hypersensitivity is not a malady merely for unbelievers; Christians are downright allergic to judging.
Todd Friel
#69. God often works more by the life of the illiterate seeking the things that are God's, than by the ability of the learned seeking the things that are their own.
Anselm Of Canterbury
#70. At the turn of the 20th century, the disparity in literacy here in the U.S. largely came down to race. Nearly half of minorities at that time - 45 percent - were illiterate, while 94 percent of white citizens were literate.
Peter Diamandis
#71. Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend - he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible - but
Neal Stephenson
#72. I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.
Rube Goldberg
#73. The problem is not scientifically illiterate kids; it is scientifically illiterate adults. Kids are born curious about the natural world. They are always turning over rocks, jumping with two feet into mud puddles and playing with the tablecloth and fine china.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#74. I admire Laura Bush because she's the only librarian who would marry an illiterate.
Hal Sparks
#75. Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.
Fidel Castro
#76. The greatest illiterate is the inability to learn the great things of life from small things around.
Matthew Ashimolowo
#77. Gene snapped at Peter: "Peter, you're an illiterate idiot who can't read or even talk correctly and never finished school." "Yeah," said Peter, "and I'm in the same band as you.
Paul Stanley
#78. In Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:
Alain De Botton
#79. Increasingly, America is biblically illiterate.
George Barna
#80. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#81. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
#82. They believe Miles can read it," she said. "Good grief. They must be completely illiterate
or desperately gullible
or
"
"French," said Mr Carsington.
Loretta Chase
#83. Illiterate people should only be charged for the photographs; when buying a newspaper.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#84. In effect, I feel like a blind, deaf, and illiterate person working through the sensibilities and multiple, real talents of other people. Everything I do is collaborative.
Godfrey Reggio
#85. B. You're pop-culturally illiterate not to know that this number is a song.
Kresley Cole
#86. I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.
Octavia Butler
#87. 'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.
Jonathan Kozol
#88. You cannot be both prosperous and illiterate at the same time.
Sunday Adelaja
#89. Love is blind," Harriet quipped.
"But not illiterate," Elizabeth retorted.
Julia Quinn
#90. The effects of illegal immigration aren't that different from those of legal immigration - an illiterate Central American farmer with a green card is just as unsuited for a 21st-century economy as an illiterate Central American farmer without a green card.
Mark Krikorian
#91. I've discovered that most critics themselves are cinematically illiterate. They don't really know much about movies. They don't know the history. They don't know the technology. They don't know anything. So for them to try to analyze it, they're lost.
George Lucas
#92. Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed.
John Ortberg
#93. I founded Grameen Bank to provide loans to those considered traditionally unbankable. Grameen Bank works with the poorest and often illiterate, providing uncollateralized micro-loans for tiny business enterprises by which they can lift themselves and their families out of poverty.
Muhammad Yunus
#94. We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.
Robert Winston
#95. I wrote on the door of my heart, 'Please do not enter.'
Love came smiling and said: 'Sorry I am an illiterate.
Michael Paul
#96. What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?
Delores Phillips
#97. Regardless of who they are, whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Afghan women often describe the difference between men and women in just one word: freedom.
Jenny Nordberg
#98. 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.
Colin Wilson
#99. Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village
Bunker Roy
#100. 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
