"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"Once you learn to read, you will forever be free."
— Frederick Douglass

"My bursting heart must find vent at my pen."
— Abigail Adams

"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!"
— Jan Karon

"If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads."
— François Mauriac

"It wasn't raindrops at all. It was a great solid mass of water that might have been a lake or a whole ocean dropping out of the sky on top of them, and down it came, down and down and down, crashing first onto the seagulls and then onto the peach itself, while the poor travelers shrieked with fear and groped around frantically for something to catch hold of- the peach stem, the silk strings, anything they could find- and all the time the water came pouring and roaring down upon them, bouncing and smashing and sloshing and slashing and swashing and swirling and surging and whirling and gurgling and gushing and rushing and rushing, and it was like being pinned down underneath the biggest waterfall in the world and not being able to get out."
— Roald Dahl

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

""Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?"

"
— John Mendoza

"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential."
— Kofi Annan

"“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.”

"
— Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

"Art is literacy of the heart."
— Elliot Eisner

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

"
— Frederick Douglass

"When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading."
— John Adams

"To read is to empower
To empower is to write
To write is to influence
To influence is to change
To change is to live."
— Jane Evershed

"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope."
— Kofi Annan

"I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country; since about 1980, oddly enough. … I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and after the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, but I was hungry. And I'm sitting there eating and reading a book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, so I'm reading a book. The waitress comes over to me like, [gum smacking] "What'chu readin' for?" I had never been asked that. Not "What am I reading?", but "What am I reading for?" Goddangit, you stumped me. Hmm, why do I read? I suppose I read for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress."
— Bill Hicks

"The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do. "
— Thomas Jefferson