"Illiteracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can think again of the problems which were before us when Spain added those which are to ask our attention. The greater problem before the American people is not any new one. The Christianization of nearly three millions of colored people yet in illiteracy and moral darkness is a call to Christian love and service as loud as any call can possibly be. The messages of the gospel of Peace, have the only promise of salvation to these millions in darkness at our own doors. To give this to these needy ones, who are not only near to ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... in life that lies too deep for any mere change of environment to touch. Sammy remembered a lesson the shepherd had given her: gentle spirit may express itself in the rude words of illiteracy; it is not therefore rude. Ruffianism may speak the language of learning or religion; it is ruffianism still. Strength may wear the garb of weakness, and still be strong; and a weakling may carry the weapons of strength, but fight with ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... 23: The British Poets.' Vol. 23 is delightful—do tell me about Vol. 23. Are you doing much in the British Poets? But when the deuce, you wonderful being, do you find time to read? I don't find any—it's too hideous. One relapses in London into such illiteracy and barbarism. I have to keep up a false glitter to hide in conversation my rapidly increasing ignorance: I should be so ashamed after all to see other people NOT shocked by it. But teach me, teach ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... foreign vote will learn eventually that there are more American-born women in the United States than foreign-born men and women; and those who dread the ignorant vote will study the statistics and see that the percentage of illiteracy is much smaller among ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... mountain people have missed contact with the outside world and have been deprived of the stimulus of new ideas, they seldom give evidence of anything that can fairly be classed as degeneracy. Ignorance, illiteracy, and suspended or arrested development the traveler of today will find among them, and actions which will shock his present-day standards; but these same actions would hardly have shocked his own father's great-grandfather. ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... that Viscount Harberton sees a chance for his own order in the circumstance that, while the poor man's child is driven to school by the inspector, the rich man can 'boot the spy out,' and so confer on his children the priceless boon of complete illiteracy. Shall we live to see a House of Lords ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... has already sounded the alarm in the appalling figures which mark how dangerously high the tide of illiteracy has risen among our voters ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VIII.: James A. Garfield • James D. Richardson
... out forty-five per cent of illiteracy in less than forty years; to find millions of children in the common schools; to find twenty thousand Negroes learning trades under the soul inspiring banner of free labor; to find other thousands successfully operating many commercial enterprises; among these, several banks, one cotton mill, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... communes is the immediate servant of a rich man, as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller. It is as false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write. There is an element of Capitalism in all modern countries, as there is an element of illiteracy in all modern countries. There are some who think that the number of our fellow-citizens who can sign their names ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything in the bank to sign it for, but I am not ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... cloister schools preserved the records of literature. The study of language, and the mental discrimination and refinement which spring from it and from literary discipline, passed away. Centuries of comparative illiteracy—dark centuries—followed. Yet the monks were often active in their own rude style of composition; and among them were not only good men, but men of eminent natural abilities, who were unconsciously paving the way for ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... would suggest, and it is one that is to be ever applied, is education. Reduce the percentage of illiteracy. Let the public schools teach not only reading and writing, but let public schools teach all the principles of American popular government. [Applause.] Let us go back to the days in which I was taught ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... West. Instead of the rich or noblemen absorbing the land of the peasants, we find in Russia the peasant commune succeeding tot he property of the baron. An average Russian peasant is by far more democratic and educated, irrespective of his illiteracy than an average farmer of the New World. He has the culture of the ages in his traditions, religion and national folk-arts. Russia has more than a thousand municipal theaters, more than a hundred grand operas, more than a hundred colleges and universities or musical ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... only added one wrong to another. He also doubted, as will be seen in a later chapter, where his conversation with John Bernard is quoted, whether the negroes could be immediately emancipated with safety either to themselves or to the whites, in their actual condition of ignorance, illiteracy, and helplessness. The plan which he favored, and which, it would seem, was his hope and reliance, was first the checking of importation, followed by a gradual emancipation, with proper compensation to the owners and suitable preparation and education for the slaves. He ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... from their low estate with a remarkable progress. They have applied themselves to take hold of knowledge as no other people ever did in the annals of history. They have made great inroads upon their previous illiteracy. They have rapidly acquired property. They have developed industrial skill, and established the evidences of business facility. They have shown themselves capable of good citizenship, both in the understanding of its duties and the practice of them. They have vindicated the act of emancipation ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... whole or in part by the State, nation, or by the proceeds of any tax levied upon any community. Make education compulsory so far as to deprive all persons who can not read and write from becoming voters after the year 1890, disfranchising none, however, on grounds of illiteracy who may be voters at the time ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... recalls what that snobbish Bines was unfair enough to tell her. I've done my utmost to convince her that Bines spoke in the way he did about Mrs. Wybert because he knew she was aware of those ridiculous tales of his mother's illiteracy. But Avice is—er—my dear, she is like her mother in more ways than one. Assuredly she doesn't ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... peasant was accustomed to receive in exchange for his production of food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather more than he did before the war. But he has no matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages the most frequent excuse for keeping children from school is a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as I have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove, without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in which ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... mixed. The cessation of Ethiopian trade, which mainly used Eritrean ports before the war, leaves Eritrea with a large economic hole to fill. Eritrea's economic future depends upon its ability to master fundamental social problems like illiteracy, unemployment, and low skills, and to convert the diaspora's money and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... that reaped the victory, not the reformed religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and the oppression that had been their fate with the dissolution ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... reminded us of a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, was beyond all others well versed in the bewildering ways of the veldt. He apparently had no skill for the conducting of set battles, but for ambushing convoys, for capturing isolated detachments, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... largely aided in maintaining a considerable amount of illiteracy in the United States in spite of the effects of the propaganda for popular education which has been carried on now for the last fifty years or more. In 1900 there were still 6,246,000 illiterates above the age of ten years in the United States, which was 10.7 per cent of the population above that ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... the Arab is active, vivacious, and keen-witted. He is proud of his lineage, earnest, and hospitable. The mother not only takes care of the home but educates the children; and, strange as it may seem to the outside world, illiteracy is ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... John Page "used to relate, on the testimony of his own ears," that Patrick Henry would speak of "the yearth," and of "men's naiteral parts being improved by larnin';"[6] while Spencer Roane mentions his pronunciation of China as "Cheena."[7] All this, however, it should be noted, does not prove illiteracy. If, indeed, such was his ordinary speech, and not, as some have suggested, a manner adopted on particular occasions for the purpose of identifying himself with the mass of his hearers, the fact is evidence ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare. Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the frugal sinewy peasants who, through centuries of oppression and starvation, have kept, in spite of almost complete illiteracy, a curiously vivid sense of personal independence. In the backs of taverns revolutionary tracts are spelled out by some boy who has had a couple of years of school to a crowd of men who listen or repeat the words after him with the fervor of people going through ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... no doubt expressed the surprise I felt at this confession of illiteracy on the part ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... with which they receive education, and profit by it, is another indication of their capacity for advancement. True, there is still an appalling illiteracy among them, some 70 per cent. of them in the South being unable to write. But we must remember that hardly a quarter of a century ago it was a crime to teach one of them to read; they were sedulously kept in ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... Line of Educational Activity: Every genuinely democratic power must, in the domain of education, in a country where illiteracy and ignorance reign supreme, make its first aim the struggle against this darkness. It must acquire in the shortest time universal literacy, by organising a network of schools answering to the demands of modern pedagogics; it must introduce ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... competent people on this globe of ours, which is round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. There is less illiteracy, less pauperism, less drunkenness, more general intelligence, more freedom in Switzerland than in any other country on earth. This has been so for two hundred years: and the reason, some say, is that she has no standing army and no navy. She is surrounded by big nations that are so jealous of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... criticised severely the croakers and the demagogues who were endeavoring to mislead the people, and reviewed with sympathy the great progress that had been made since the war. He pleads guilty to the charge of having new light and is glad of it. He points out with keen insight the illiteracy of the masses of the Southern people and the lack of educational facilities. A movement for the development of a public school system in the South was led by J. L. M. Curry, a Confederate soldier of Georgia stock. He became an evangelist in the crusade for public education, announcing before State ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... communicating Martial Affairs to the Kingdom of England;" the monarchical title our commonwealth men had not yet had time enough to obliterate from their colloquial style. This writer called himself, in his barbarous English, The Moderate! It would be hard to conceive the meanness and illiteracy to which the English language was reduced under the pens of the rabble-writers of these days, had we not witnessed in the present time a parallel to their compositions. "The Moderate!" was a title assumed on the principle on which Marat ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... no attempt at concealment, and indeed little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete illiteracy, common to all Honduras. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck |
