Illiteracy Quotes - Page 5

• 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

  Men, Hunger Poverty, Volunteer

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• To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

  Lynne Truss

  Friday, Writing, Average

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• The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension; an alarming increase of packaged language (cliches used in speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute visual media (especially television and video) for written language.

  Mihai Nadin

  Reading, Writing, Media

  Mihai Nadin (1997). “The Civilization of Illiteracy”, p.17, Dresden University Press

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• By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. Eighty percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled, despite the fact that we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago.

  Vin Suprynowicz

  Real, Educational, Assessment

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• I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.

  Ishmael Reed

  Education, Hurt, Cancer

  Ishmael Reed (1988). “Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper”, Scribner

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• We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Creativity, People, Leader

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• There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.

  Peter Greenaway

  Potters, Film, Lord

  "'You have naked bodies and genitalia, don't you? Why are you so adolescent?': Director Peter Greenaway on 'Puritan' Americans and the intense sex scenes in 'Eisenstein in Guanajuato'". Interview with Gary M. Kramer, www.salon.com. February 4, 2016.

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• I have a vision of India-an India free of hunger and fear, an India free of illiteracy and want.

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee

  Vision, India, Want

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1999). “Decisive Days”

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• First and foremost, I would put a massive national emphasis on illiteracy with real markers that you could measure and real efforts to do a one-on-one kind of tutoring until kids can get up to snuff on that.

  Mitch Albom

  Real, Kids, Effort

  Source: www.npr.org

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• In Afghanistan you are not rebuilding, you are building. There is very limited infrastructure and extreme terrain, with deserts in the south and mountains so high in some areas that helicopters don't even fly well at a certain altitude because the air becomes so thin. The country has a serious problem of illiteracy, especially after so many years of war and Taliban rule.

  David Petraeus

  Country, War, Years

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