I think the reason I don't read is because, when I'm reading, I feel like I'm missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where's my girlfriend?
Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
The comic-book industry today is not what it was back then, unfortunately. Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books; they've got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the world around them.
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
I believe in open government. I've always believed in open government. I don't e-mail, however. And there's a reason: I don't want you reading my personal stuff.
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.
A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, . . . that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.