The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.
Interpretation
Literacy was essential for young people to engage with the pulp magazines of the past.
Isaac Asimov reflects on a time when pulp magazines required readers, particularly the youth, to be literate to access various narratives and information. This highlights the critical role that reading and literacy played in shaping the perspectives and knowledge of younger generations, as they sought enjoyment and understanding through print media.
In practice
Using this quote during a literacy campaign to emphasize the importance of reading.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.
I don't ask other actors questions. I think that's too intrusive. I just watch. I don't want to be constricted to an idea of what acting is by anyone else. I want to take my own education.
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity.
Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
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