Illiterate Quotes

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

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.

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation – as an actor and as a person – perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it’s cute.

No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a life’ by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

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.

I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.

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.

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.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

The greatest illiterate is the inability to learn the great things of life from small things around.

My only model for being a father was my father, an illiterate on the margin of society.

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

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.

The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.

TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

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.

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.

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.

I read a lot, but in comparison to my family, it’s nothing. I keep telling them, ‘I’m the illiterate of the family.’ My grandfather used to read five books at a time.

‘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.

Normally if I met a guy who was unemployed and illiterate who hadn’t bathed in a couple of weeks, I’d be standing in a puddle with excitement, but I’m sort of in a bad mood tonight, so take this bag and give me the fu**ing paper before I pop your head like a zit. He said, you’re a lesbian, aren’t you?

The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.

I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a ‘deserter.’ What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar, and a functional illiterate. And he poops his pants.

In Florida I was illiterate, Boxing Authority didn’t want me, then they had a special psychiatrist to come to Kentucky, they checked and they didn’t want me. But as soon as my name was Mohammed Ali, as soon as I announced I was a Muslim, then all of a sudden I became smart.

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they’re going to fall behind.

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.

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

I think it says something that I have never had an obscene letter. A young man once attempted one, but it was so totally illiterate and hopeless that it made me laugh.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.

No one can be in any doubt that Britain is becoming more like Europe, though few in an increasingly economically illiterate media seem to realise it.

I don’t say things like “the grace of God.” All that’s white noise to me, not because I’m an intellectual. For many people, it’s gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.

If the press really thinks Obama is Lincoln, they ought to treat him like they treated Bush, ’cause that’s how they treated Lincoln. His critics compared Lincoln to an ape; they called him an illiterate baboon.

ItВ’s scandalous when one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are.

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone’s illiterate, but you wouldn’t really call that privacy. That’s ignorance.

Joe Jackson was a tragic figure. He was a serene country boy who signed a confession he couldn’t read. He was illiterate.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

The public is totally illiterate in America. It can’t read at all. It’s absolutely insensitive to words.

A good book for an illiterate is a golden ring for a fingerless hand!

Politicians are notoriously economically illiterate. And even when they know what would be the right thing, we don’t really expect them to do it.

I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

We have reduced poverty in the world by 50% since the year 1970 – the number of people who go to bed hungry, the number of people that have to sleep without a roof over their heads, the number of people that are illiterate.The world is better.

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.

There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

An enlightened society is one where all people – the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the black and the white, men and women – live happily as children of the same Lord. Thus experiencing the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God.

[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.

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.

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.

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can’t read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.

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.

One thing that struck me in my study of history is how people are excluded. I don’t mean just racial minorities or women. Pretty much all poor people who don’t have documents are excluded from history and its records. People who were illiterate usually didn’t leave any primary documents.

The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded…. I fear that, if the green movement’s high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

Increasingly, America is biblically illiterate.

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.

I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.

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.

I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.

You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Music is a language, and it’s like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like ‘new music,’ ‘avant-garde,’ or something like that, I think it’s like cutting out half the dictionary.

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

I have said with as much sincerity as I can muster that if I were thrown into a dungeon with a sentence of one hundred years, with my only company being an illiterate guard who came twice a day with meals but who never spoke, I would still write – on coarse toilet paper in the dark if I could spare it.

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.

Anybody who tells a very big lie is paid attention to. If you say, ‘Shakespeare could not write. He was illiterate,’ everybody says, ‘Well, what do you know that we don’t?’ That’s what Trump does all the time.

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.

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

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.

You said, ‘How is it possible for democracy to work with an illiterate people who are dying of hunger?’ But with that people we made a democracy work.

My mother only had a third grade education, was illiterate, worked as a domestic 2 to 3 jobs at a time, because she didn’t want to be on welfare, because she never saw people who went on welfare come off of welfare, and she just didn’t want to have her life controlled in that fashion.

You can rule ignorance; you can manipulate the illiterate; you can do whatever you want when a people are uneducated, so that goes in line with corrupt business and corrupt politics.

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.

Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi can rightly boast of having won a war, but if she won it, she should first of all thank Yahya Khan and his gang of illiterate psychopaths.

A dream is a telegram from the hidden world…Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.

One must always have in mind one simple fact – there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time – relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.

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.

Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

I think the thing that our government lacks – just about more than anything else – is technological competence. We have some of the greatest white-hat hackers in the world here in the U.S., but the government seems to be technologically illiterate.

I wonder is illiterate people know the full meaning of alphabet soup?

Here’s where I luck out: I’m really computer illiterate.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.

It is the public that is illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and environmental advocacy groups that manufacture fear for misconceptions about energy.

Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don’t understand images: they don’t understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

Luckily, I’m not educated. If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop.

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.

He who has read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

I really don’t know why Scarlett has such appeal. When I began writing the sequel, I had a lot of trouble because Scarlett is not my kind of person. She’s virtually illiterate, has no taste, never learns from her mistakes.

Sixty-six percent is the literacy rate in the Arab world. We have 58 million illiterate among adults in our part of the world.

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.

God’s visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. … For just an instant the sky grew luminous with angels, yet who saw the spectacle? Illiterate hirelings who watched the flocks of others, “nobodies” who failed to leave their names.

Our prisons are full of people who are illiterate and innumerate, have been failed by the care system, and often have had a parent in prison.

Any education system that only memorizes things creates robots and will never produce Nobel laureates. Any education system that only emphasizes improvisation will get a bunch of people who may think they are creative, but they are functionally illiterate.

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.

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.

The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.

It’s a great lesson in modesty that you realize you’re illiterate in a field that you think you’re an expert in.

He is too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station and reputation.

Therefore we pledge to bind
ourselves to one another, to embrace
our lowliest, to keep company with
our loneliest, to educate our illiterate,
to feed our starving, to clothe our
ragged, to do all good things,
knowing that we are more than
keepers of our brothers and sisters.
We are our brothers and sisters

Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians.

My partner doesn’t read. He’s not illiterate – he just chooses not to read – and I love reading. I’m obsessed with reading.

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s…the same fraction…of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War.

I am the son of an illiterate father and mother.

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.

You have to excuse me because I AM a teenager, so I’m allowed to sound illiterate and make stupid comments like ‘I’m not into hard-core feminism.’

My father, who was illiterate, smoothed iron for Ford Dagenham and we’d get up at 5;30 A.M. to give him a jump-start. My mother was a nurse and part of the Windrush generation. Growing up in east London, we were financially poor, but rich in hope and dignity, and we were happy.

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.

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.

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.

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?

Having a financially illiterate society is dangerous, and we have to do something about that.

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look, to me, illiterate. They look hasty, like someone babbling.