"Illiteracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which I have spoken before, gave us some facts about him. In New York it found 62.58 per cent of the population of the slum to be foreign-born, whereas for the whole city the percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of illiteracy in all was only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per cent. That with nearly twice as many saloons to a given number there should be three times as many arrests in the slum as in the city at large need not be attributed to nationality, except indirectly in its possible responsibility ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... know you knew half those things," she said, and became depressed at her relative illiteracy. It was natural, after such encouragement, to write to the scholastic agents in ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... head them advertisements 'Suckers, Attention'?" asked one of the men who labored under the disadvantage of illiteracy. The scraps read aloud from the papers were his only source of information as to their contents. "They oughter say 'Suckers, Attention,' for they don't even tell whut the kid looks like. I wouldn't know him from Adam ef I wuz ter ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... serious of the educational shortcomings thus revealed is a high percentage of illiteracy—nearly eight per cent, I understand, the country over. The seriousness of such a situation can scarcely be overestimated. It was serious in time of war—the inability of a soldier to read orders, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was that barbarian chieftain who laid his hand on his sword and cried, "Would I and my men had been there!" or those Western cowboys, so the story runs, bred in illiteracy and irreligion, to whose children a school-teacher had given an account of the same great events, and who rode up to the schoolhouse the next day with guns and ropes, and asked: "Which way did them ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... self-contradictions with a childish pride of paradox. In one breath they deplored the ignorance of a public too uncultivated to appreciate them; in another breath they proclaimed that every government which strives to diminish illiteracy is digging its own grave. Priding themselves on the thoroughness of their own investigations, they belittled the results of learning in others, mocked at the superficial labour of the Benedictines, ridiculed ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... purpose, backed by an organization for just such good work. This evangelical fire burned strong in him despite the crude shifts he was put to, the loneliness, the perplexities and trials of the spirit. Just as an educated humanitarian coming upon an illiterate people would gladly banish their illiteracy, so Thompson was resolved to banish what he deemed the spiritual darkness of these primitive folk. Holding as he did to the orthodoxy of sin and salvation, of a literal heaven and a nebulous sort of hell, he deemed it his business to show them with certainty ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... this time sixty-nine years old, a tall, robust, vigorous man with a stern face of remarkable vulgar strength. The illiteracy of his youth survived; he could not write the simplest words correctly, and his speech was a brusque medley of slang, jargon, dialect and profanity. It was said of him that he could swear more forcibly, variously ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... discovering a more enthusiastic people than the teachers and the scholars of the Southern uplands. The appalling extent of illiteracy among the descendants of Marion's men finds a parallel in their pathetic desire for ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... been truthfully said that the fundamental problem in this question of immigration is most frequently overlooked. Back of the statistics of illiteracy, pauperism, criminality, and the economic value of immigrants lies another one of great proportions. What has been the effect upon our native stock? What has been the expense, to our native stock, of this increase of population and wealth through ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... used to these interruptions and eruptions of illiteracy on our part. I think she rather enjoys them, as in the presence of such complete ignorance as ours her lamp of knowledge ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... 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 ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... 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, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... has already sounded the alarm in the appalling figures which mark how dangerously high the tide of illiteracy has risen among our ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of Hungary and Roumania. At the daily rate of 2,800 it would take this indescribable assortment more than 166 days to pass in single file. Then the Italians would consume about eighty days more. For over eight months you would have watched so large a proportion of illiteracy, incompetency, and insensibility to American ideals, that you would be tempted to despair of the Republic. Nor would you lose the sense of nightmare when the English and Irish were consuming forty-two days ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... reason why no books were found in his house, this is the reason why his solicitor, Thomas Greene, lived with him in his house at New Place (Halliwell-Phillipps: Outlines, 1889, Vol. i, p. 226);—a well-known fact that very much puzzles those who do not realize the depth of Shakspeare's illiteracy. ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... future remains 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 |
