A Quote by Tom Chatfield

Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.

Tom Chatfield

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Adult Centuries Few In The Past Literacy Majority Mass Only Past Phenomenon Population Reached Within World Years

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Tom Chatfield
British - Author
Born: 1980

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Alex Campbell

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

Bjorn Lomborg

Thus, human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of the kind that could not have happened in the past...Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.

Roger Revelle

But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past - or more accurately, pastness - is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

Junot Diaz

Cinema has only been around for about 100 years. Has all of the world's violence towards women taken place only within the past 100 years?

Richard King

The past is the past. As long as it's not a mass-murderer past! You're with the person who you're with as they are now.

Ashley Greene

There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years.

Dan Brown

I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past.

Robert Breault

No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music, pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge, and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.

Jacqueline Emerson

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

Shock equals discovery, and if I narrated my past, you'd be pretty grossed out too, I bet - same as if you narrated yours. Aren't we all composed of our past mistakes? Isn't that part of emerging into an adult awareness of the world?

D. T. Max

The past is an interpretation. The future is on illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

Shams Tabrizi

Italy will start the future. Because in the last 20, 20 years, Italy discussed only about the past. "Oh, the past is wonderful in Italy." Look, look Palazzo Vecchio. The most beautiful place in the world, in my opinion, I think this is incredible place. But the past is not sufficient. Is not enough. We need the future. Because we are Italians. And Italy is not only a museum.

Matteo Renzi

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

Howard Zinn

A Quote by Tom Chatfield

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