Top 245 Illiterate Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

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Last updated on April 15, 2025.
The worst way of oppression involve exploitation of children, preying on vulnerability, denying others the right to live safely, and denying people of their right to education. Two-thirds of the world's illiterate are women. Sixty-six percent of countries have no laws to protect women from domestic abuse, and battery is the largest cause of injury to women in America.
It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed.
The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded....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.
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.
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.
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.
The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
When I became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman authors, I thought it incumbent upon me to do something towards the honor of the place of my nativity, and to vindicate the rhetoric of this ancient forum of our Metropolis from the aspersions of the illiterate by composing A Treatise of the Alercation of the Ancients; wherein I have demonstrated that the purity, sincerity, and simplicity of their diction is nowhere so well preserved as amongst my neighbourhood.
A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. 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.
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
Our legal system, including the police, is anti-Dalit and anti-poor. The death penalty laws' wrathful majesty, in blood-shot equality, deals the fatal blow on the poor not the rich, the pariah not the brahmin, the black not the white, the underdog not the top dog, the dissenter not the conformist. . . The law barks at all but bites only the poor, the powerless, the illiterate, the ignorant.
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.
Sincere thought, real free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting.
To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.
The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler (or crook) of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent eveil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represent a more saddening phenomenon ("phénomène", Fr.) than an unfortune illiterate fellow having commited an offence.
All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father's secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn't know they were there.
Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all the social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering.
We must reach out to villages even in scorching heat with temperature upto 44 C. We must ensure that no girl child remains illiterate. I request all the social institutions and the media world to create a joyous environment for education in the month of June (when schools re-open), an environment to encourage children to go to school. We will derive the satisfaction of having done a social good.
Whether one is rich or poor, educated or illiterate, religious or nonbelieving, man or woman, black, white, or brown, we are all the same. Physically, emotionally, and mentally, we are all equal. We all share basic needs for food, shelter, safety, and love. We all aspire to happiness and we all shun suffering. Each of us has hopes, worries, fears, and dreams. Each of us wants the best for our family and loved ones. We all experience pain when we suffer loss and joy when we achieve what we seek. On this fundamental level, religion, ethnicity, culture, and language make no difference.
We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between theilliterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.
One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
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.
Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.
Oh noes, kitteh haz major angriez!” I said. I turned around to share a laugh with my companions and found them glaring at me. “What?” I asked. Leif shook a finger and said in a low, menacing tone, “If you tell me I have to talk like an illiterate halfwit to fit into this society, I will punch you.” “And I’ll pull out your goatee,” Gunnar added. “Lolcat iz new happeh wai 2 talk,” I explained to them. “U doan haz 2 be kitteh 2 speek it.
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.
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.
Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them. — © Peter Greenaway
Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.
Meanwhile, their [evolutionists] unproven theories will continue to be accepted by the learned and the illiterate alike as absolute truth, and will be defended with a frantic intolerance that has a parallel only in the bigotry of the darkest Middle Ages. If one does not accept evolution as an infallible dogma, implicitly and without question, one is regarded as an unenlightened ignoramus or is merely ignored as an obscurantist or a naive, uncritical fundamentalist.
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
The Ragamuffin rabble are the unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on His mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth. Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary.
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.
What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.
One hundred years ago, people were faced with the choice of learning to read or remaining illiterate laborers who would be left behind as have-nots in a rapidly modernizing world. In the coming century, being able to command a world that will be thoroughly computerized will set apart those who can live successfully in the future from those who will be utterly left behind.
To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
True spiritual knowledge has sometimes flourished most grandly in some who were without eloquence and almost illiterate. And this is very clearly shown by the case of the Apostles and many holy men, who did not spread themselves out with an empty show of leaves, but were bowed down by the weight of the true fruits of spiritual knowledge: of whom it is written in Acts: 'But when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were ignorant and unlearned men, they were astonished' (Acts 4:13).
Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors-often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to young to understand in the least, and often in letters which are almost illiterate. If children are to be taught to respect the work of American poets I think some better way might be found to do so- some way which would not make such an inconsiderate demand on the author's time.
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.
We're growing up with a very illiterate bunch of children who have somehow been taught that film is fact when, in fact, it's invention. Hopefully, an historical film will inspire people to go and read about the history but in the end it is a work of fiction and selection. As for the armour itself, no it wasn't particularly comfortable.
Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.
Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate. He may look stupid. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. If you underrate him he will bitterly resent it or impute to you the deficiency in brains and knowledge you imputed to him.
Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?
When we begin to understand the concept of Karma we will never ever blame God for anything that happens to us. We will realise that we are responsible for all that happens to us. As we sow, so shall we reap. Rich or poor, saint or sinner, miser or philanthropist, learned or illiterate ... This is the Universal Law that applies to individuals, to whole communities, societies, nations and races. As we sow, so shall we reap.
If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.
My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.
You know the AME Church has a history of empowering black people and having an international outlook. So it was the women of the church who began to give Sarah Breedlove an image of herself as something other than an illiterate washerwoman, and she wanted to make her life better, and her daughter's life better.
I am to consider the many advantages arising from a frequent use of oaths, curses, and imprecations. In the first place, this genteel accomplishment is a wonderful help to discourse; as it supplies the want of good sense, learning, and eloquence. The illiterate and stupid, by the help of oaths, become orators; and he, whose wretched intellects would not permit him to utter a coherent sentence, by this easy practice, excites the laughter, and fixes the attention, of a brilliant and joyous circle.
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.
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 learned from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.
The script was classic Joe Eszterhas, intelligent, steamy and provocative. At one time, Eszterhas was Hollywood's highest paid writer, illiterate rock and roll bad boy whose 14 films glorified sex, drugsa nd cigarettes. Eszterhas also fought publicly with producers and politicians. In 1995 he argued that some of the misdeeds of the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations were more obscene than anything in an "R" rated movie.
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