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Illiterate Quotes

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Illiterate Quotes

“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”

“Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.”

“My throat closed up, and I read and read and read, but no words came. The air became thick and stank of metal- not magic but burning, unforgiving steel creeping toward me, inch by inch. 'Answer it!' Lucien shouted, his voice hitched. My eyes stung. The world was just a blur of letters, mocking me with their turns and shapes.”

“Quinns always come at half price, about half the time, and half-naked, even during the colder half of winter. A Quinn is like a queen, but draggier, and cheaper to buy and use for personal gain, unless you’re suspicious that you’re poor and illiterate like Jarod Kintz, in which case Quinns could be the spirits of your dead relatives, come to haunt you until you gather a massive fortune through selling books on the internet, to send some back in time through a portal you bought from the NSA, so they would have lived better lives without having to move a finger for their fortune. Oh, yah, and since they aren’t - they’re blue, like smurfs, yet they turn purple whenever tickled on the belly, which is something they seem to rather dislike, since they start biting and scratching when it happens, for no good reason, I might add.”

“Who would have thought that the self-righteous human girl couldn't read?' 'Keep your damned mouth shut about it.' 'Me? I wouldn't dream of telling anyone. Why waste that kind of knowledge on petty gossip?' If I'd had the strength, I would have leaped on him and ripped him apart. 'You're a disgusting bastard.' 'I'll have to ask Tamlin if that kind of flattery won his heart.”

“He glanced down at the map on the table, and his voice was void of anything- any emotion, any anger or amusement- as he said, 'What is that?' I snatched up my map. 'I thought I should learn my surroundings.' Drip, drip, drip. I opened my mouth to point out his hand again, but he said, 'You can't write, can you.' I didn't answer. I didn't know what to say. Ignorant, insignificant human. 'No wonder you become so adept at other things.' I supposed he was so far gone in thinking about his encounter with the Bogge that he hadn't realised the compliment he'd given me. If it was a compliment.”

“I could help you write to them, if that's why you're in here.' I jerked back in my seat, almost knocking over the chair, and whirled to find Tamlin right behind me, a stack of books in his arms. I pushed back against the heat rising in my cheeks and ears, the panic at the information he might be guessing I'd been trying to send. 'Help? You mean a faerie is passing up the opportunity to mock an ignorant human?' He set the books down on the table, his jaw tight. I couldn't read the titles glinting on the leather spines. 'Why should I mock you for a shortcoming that isn't your fault? Let me help you. I owe you for the hand.' Shortcoming. It was a shortcoming. Yet it was one thing to bandage his hand, to talk to him as if he wasn't a predator build to kill and destroy, but to reveal how little I truly knew, to let him see that part of me that was still a child, unfinished and raw... His face was unreadable. Though there had been no pity in his voice. I straightened. 'I'm fine.' 'You think I've got nothing better to do with my time than come up with elaborate ways to humiliate you?”

“The American people spend thousands of dollars to propagate the doctrines of the fall of man, the creation of the world out of nothing in six days by a personal God, vicarious atonement, absolution from sin by the shedding of innocent blood. This is the Christianity offered to the poor and illiterate of India... Christianity has percolated through the layers of dogmatism and bigotry, of intolerance and superstition, of damnation and hell fire. It takes on itself the quality of these layers and imparts them to those that are received within its folds.”

“The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.”

“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.”

“Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.”

“Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .”

“God's visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. ... For just an instant the sky grew luminous with angels, yet who saw the spectacle? Illiterate hirelings who watched the flocks of others, "nobodies" who failed to leave their names.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A political system seeking to function amongst ignorant, illiterate and barbaric people could have marvelous principles but could only succeed in being ignorant, illiterate and barbaric unless one addressed the people one by one and cured the ignorance, illiteracy and barbarism of each citizen.”

“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.”

“It happened very providentially, to the honor of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were at their height.”

“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.”

“The mysteries of the faith are not to [be] explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted.”

“By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as is widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from prescientific cultures.”