Horace Mann Quotes

In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind speak of color.

Ignorance has been well represented under the similitude of a dungeon, where, though it is full of life, yet darkness and silence reign. But in society the bars and locks have been broken; the dungeon itself is demolished; the prisoners are out; they are in the midst of us. We have no security but to teach and renovate them.

Knowledge is a mimic creation.

Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purposes, whether of good or of evil.

Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.

Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effetive, for the protections of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training, as our system of Common Schools could be made to impart; and would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such education and training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance?

School is the cheapest police.

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

The pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place "trains" to overreaching and fraud; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good.

If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.

You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.

When a child can be brought to tears, not from fear of punishment, but from repentance for his offence, he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from grief at one's own conduct, be sure there is an angel nestling in the bosom.

You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it; but let all you tell be truth.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.

Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.

Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. Whoever yields to temptation debases himself with a debasement from which he can never arise.

A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.

The experience of the ages that are past, the hopes of the ages that are yet to come, unite their voices in an appeal to us;– they implore us to think more of the character of our people than of its numbers; to look upon our vast natural resources, not as tempters to ostentation and pride, but as means to be converted by the refining alchemy of education into mental and spiritual treasures; ...and thus give to the world the example of a nation whose wisdom increases with its prosperity, and whose virtues are equal to its power.

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

Biography, especially of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records.

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.

Keep one thing in view forever- the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinion of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.

You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.

Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.

Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolate by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.

It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered, amongst the multitude! Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions may be propagated amongst the people. Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government.

As an innovation... the establishment of Free Schools was the boldest ever promulgated, since the commencement of the Christian era... Time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. It was one of those grand mental and moral experiments... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.

To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?

Republics, one after another . . . have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. . . .