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.
Interpretation
Literacy is essential for personal and societal advancement.
Kofi Annan emphasizes that literacy is a fundamental skill that enables individuals to achieve their fullest potential and contributes to overall human progress. By highlighting the importance of reading and writing for everyone, he showcases how education empowers people to improve their lives and contribute positively to society.
In practice
During a speech about education reform, one might quote this to highlight the importance of literacy for all.
If you have a problem and you can't find a solution, you meet again tomorrow and you keep talking until you find a solution. You can disagree with behavior or a particular position, but you do not resort to calling an opponent worthless.
Let us remember the large numbers of citizens who, day in and day out, through acts of volunteerism large and small, bring hope to so many of the world's disadvantaged. Let us ensure that this wonderful resource, available in abundance to every nation, is recognized and supported as it works towards a more prosperous and peaceful world.
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.
The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what β and who β we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.
Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950]
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.
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