Most of the world's problems will be solved if literacy prevailed.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.

Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.

Library science was the foundation of all sciences.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

Everyone's talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don't think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that's what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren't going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are —scientifically illiterate.— That's just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War— when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there's a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.

...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.