Horace Mann

1:Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken.
~ Horace Mann,

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1:Deeds survive the doers. ~ Horace Mann,

2:Knowledge is a mimic creation. ~ Horace Mann,

3:School is the cheapest police. ~ Horace Mann,

4:Love must be the same in all worlds. ~ Horace Mann,

5:There is nothing so costly as ignorance. ~ Horace Mann,

6:The most ignorant are the most conceited. ~ Horace Mann,

7:Avoid witticisms at the expense of others. ~ Horace Mann,

8:Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind. ~ Horace Mann,

9:True glory is a flame lighted at the skies. ~ Horace Mann,

10:He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. ~ Horace Mann,

11:Observation - activity of both eyes and ears. ~ Horace Mann,

12:Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals. ~ Horace Mann,

13:Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training. ~ Horace Mann,

14:Education is an organic necessity of a human being. ~ Horace Mann,

15:It is well to think well: it is divine to act well. ~ Horace Mann,

16:It is well to think well; it is divine to act well. ~ Horace Mann,

17:God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked. ~ Horace Mann,

18:You may as well borrow a person's money as his time. ~ Horace Mann,

19:A house without books is like a room without windows. ~ Horace Mann,

20:Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. ~ Horace Mann,

21:Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate. ~ Horace Mann,

22:Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications. ~ Horace Mann,

23:To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike. ~ Horace Mann,

24:Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. ~ Horace Mann,

25:In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness. ~ Horace Mann,

26:We do ourselves the most good doing something for others. ~ Horace Mann,

27:Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both. ~ Horace Mann,

28:Thank Heaven, the female heart is untenantable by atheism. ~ Horace Mann,

29:Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth. ~ Horace Mann,

30:Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. ~ Horace Mann,

31:Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power. ~ Horace Mann,

32:When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children? ~ Horace Mann,

33:He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead. ~ Horace Mann,

34:Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins. ~ Horace Mann,

35:A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated. ~ Horace Mann,

36:Be careful never to retire to rest in a room not properly ventilated. ~ Horace Mann,

37:Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain. ~ Horace Mann,

38:Praise begets emulation,--a goodly seed to sow among youthful students. ~ Horace Mann,

39:The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled. ~ Horace Mann,

40:Above all, let the poor hang up the amulet of temperance in their homes. ~ Horace Mann,

41:Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man. ~ Horace Mann,

42:Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge. ~ Horace Mann,

43:Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power. ~ Horace Mann,

44:Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that. ~ Horace Mann,

45:No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books. ~ Horace Mann,

46:The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves. ~ Horace Mann,

47:Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal. ~ Horace Mann,

48:If you wish to write well, study the life about you,--life in the public streets. ~ Horace Mann,

49:It is far more difficult, I assure you, to live for the truth than to die for it. ~ Horace Mann,

50:The Chinese have an excellent proverb: "Be modest in speech, but excel in action. ~ Horace Mann,

51:To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is. ~ Horace Mann,

52:Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it. ~ Horace Mann,

53:Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it. ~ Horace Mann,

54:The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more. ~ Horace Mann,

55:We must be purposely kind and generous or we miss the best part of life's existence. ~ Horace Mann,

56:False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse. ~ Horace Mann,

57:Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men. ~ Horace Mann,

58:Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken. ~ Horace Mann,

59:Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect. ~ Horace Mann,

60:Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken.
~ Horace Mann,

61:The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good. ~ Horace Mann,

62:We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital. ~ Horace Mann,

63:Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter. ~ Horace Mann,

64:You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much. ~ Horace Mann,

65:If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen. ~ Horace Mann,

66:If any man seeks greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both. ~ Horace Mann,

67:On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there. ~ Horace Mann,

68:Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land as the sower sows his wheatfield. ~ Horace Mann,

69:He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place. ~ Horace Mann,

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

71:It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one. ~ Horace Mann,

72:If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both. ~ Horace Mann,

73:If temperance prevails, then education can prevail; if temperance fails, then education must fail. ~ Horace Mann,

74:Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night. ~ Horace Mann,

75:Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects. ~ Horace Mann,

76:Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice. ~ Horace Mann,

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

78:The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people. ~ Horace Mann,

79:Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children. ~ Horace Mann,

80:Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young. ~ Horace Mann,

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

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

83:Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars. ~ Horace Mann,

84:Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence. ~ Horace Mann,

85:As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance. ~ Horace Mann,

86:Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect. ~ Horace Mann,

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

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

89:Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. ~ Horace Mann,

90:Reproof is a medicine, like mercury or opium; if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good. ~ Horace Mann,

91:A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron. ~ Horace Mann,

92:Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just. ~ Horace Mann,

93:Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal. ~ Horace Mann,

94:We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast. ~ Horace Mann,

95:On the face of it, it must be a bad cause which will not bear discussion. Truth seeks light instead of shunning it. ~ Horace Mann,

96:Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen ~ Horace Mann,

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

98:Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care. ~ Horace Mann,

99:Republics, one after another . . . have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. . . . ~ Horace Mann,

100:It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more. ~ Horace Mann,

101:Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now are, so will the sovereigns soon be. ~ Horace Mann,

102:We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause. ~ Horace Mann,

103:Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former. ~ Horace Mann,

104:Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth; And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error. ~ Horace Mann,

105:The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;--not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known. ~ Horace Mann,

106:We put things in order - God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west, it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is. ~ Horace Mann,

107:When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect. ~ Horace Mann,

108:Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time. ~ Horace Mann,

109:Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person’s money as his time. ~ Horace Mann,

110:Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen. —Horace Mann ~ Aleatha Romig,

111: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. ~ Horace Mann,

112:No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth. ~ Horace Mann,

113:Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise. ~ Horace Mann,

114:Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing. ~ Horace Mann,

115:He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. Whoever yields to temptation debases himself with a debasement from which he can never arise. ~ Horace Mann,

116:They who set an example make a highway. Others follow the example, because it is easier to travel on a highway than over untrodden grounds. ~ Horace Mann,

117:New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation. ~ Horace Mann,

118:I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor. ~ Horace Mann,

119:As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. ~ Horace Mann,

120:But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge. ~ Horace Mann,

121: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. ~ Horace Mann,

122:Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar. ~ Horace Mann,

123:The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward. ~ Horace Mann,

124:Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever. ~ Horace Mann,

125:The most precious wine is produced upon the sides of volcanoes. Now bold and inspiring ideals are only born of a clear head that stands over a glowing heart. ~ Horace Mann,

126:In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat. ~ Horace Mann,

127:There is not a good work which the hand of man has ever undertaken, which his heart has ever conceived, which does not require a good education for its helper. ~ Horace Mann,

128: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. ~ Horace Mann,

129:Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. ~ Horace Mann,

130:The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man. ~ Horace Mann,

131:Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity. ~ Horace Mann, Lectures and Reports on Education, Lecture 1.,

132: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. ~ Horace Mann,

133:If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. ~ Horace Mann,

134:In what pagan nation was Moloch ever propitiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, intemperance. ~ Horace Mann,

135:One thing I certainly never was made for, and that is to put principles on and off at the dictation of a party, as a lackey changes his livery at his master's command. ~ Horace Mann,

136: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. ~ Horace Mann,

137:Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water. ~ Horace Mann,

138:Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. ~ Horace Mann,

139: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. ~ Horace Mann,

140:A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one. ~ Horace Mann,

141: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. ~ Horace Mann,

142:There is nothing derogatory in any employment which ministers to the well-being of the race. It is the spirit that is carried into an employment that elevates or degrades it. ~ Horace Mann,

143: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. ~ Horace Mann,

144:Knowledge has its boundary line, where it abuts on ignorance; on the outside of that boundary line are ignorance and miracles; on the inside of it are science and no miracles. ~ Horace Mann,

145: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. ~ Horace Mann,

146:As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them. ~ Horace Mann,

147:Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. ~ Horace Mann,

148: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. ~ Horace Mann,

149:Even the choicest literature should be taken as the condiment, and not as the sustenance of life. It should be neither the warp nor the woof of existence, but only the flowery edging upon its borders. ~ Horace Mann,

150:There is a deeper pleasure in following truth to the scaffold or the cross, than in joining the multitudinous retinue, and mingling our shouts with theirs, when victorious error celebrates its triumphs. ~ Horace Mann,

151:The false man is more false to himself than to any one else. He may despoil others, but himself is the chief loser. The world's scorn he might sometimes forget, but the knowledge of his own perfidy is undying. ~ Horace Mann,

152: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. ~ Horace Mann,

153: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. ~ Horace Mann,

154:Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike. ~ Horace Mann,

155: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. ~ Horace Mann,

156:Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion. ~ Horace Mann,

157:Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. ~ Horace Mann,

158:An ignorant man is always able to say yes or no immediately to any proposition. To a wise man, comparatively few things can be propounded which do not require a response with qualifications, with discriminations, with proportion. ~ Horace Mann,

159: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. ~ Horace Mann,

160:We conceive of immortality as having a beginning, but no end; but we conceive of eternity as having neither beginning nor end. Hence it is proper to speak of eternity as the attribute of God, but of immortality as the attribute of man. ~ Horace Mann,

161: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. ~ Horace Mann,

162:Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor. ~ Horace Mann,

163: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. ~ Horace Mann,

164:Just in proportion as a man becomes good, divine, Christ-like, he passes out of the region of theorizing, of system-building, and hireling service, into the region of beneficent activities. It is well to think well. It is divine to act well. ~ Horace Mann,

165:Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms. ~ Horace Mann,

166:Benevolence is a world of itself -- a world which mankind, as yet, have hardly begun to explore. We have, as it were, only skirted along its coasts for a few leagues, without penetrating the recesses, or gathering the riches of its vast interior. ~ Horace Mann,

167:Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican. ~ Horace Mann,

168:When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven. ~ Horace Mann,

169: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. ~ Horace Mann,

170:Good books are to the young mind what the warming sun and the refreshing rain of spring are to the seeds which have lain dormant in the frosts of winter. They are more, for they may save from that which is worse than death, as well as bless with that which is better than life. ~ Horace Mann,

171:NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors. ~ Horace Mann,

172:Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment. ~ Horace Mann,

173:Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak. ~ Horace Mann,

174: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. ~ Horace Mann, twelfth annual report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, 1848. Life and Works of Horace Mann, ed. Mrs. Mary Mann, vol. 3, p. 669 (1868).,

175:Doing nothing for others is the undoing of one's self. We must be purposely kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart that goes out of itself, gets large and full of joy. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others. ~ Horace Mann,

176:The most formidable attribute of temptation is its increasing power, its accelerating ratio of velocity. Every act of repetition increases power, diminishes resistance. It is like the letting out of waters-where a drop can go, a river can go. Whoever yields to temptation, subjects himself to the law of falling bodies. ~ Horace Mann,

177: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. ~ Horace Mann,

178: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. ~ Horace Mann,

179:Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach. ~ Horace Mann,

180:education pioneers including Horace Mann and the never-married Catharine Beecher “explicitly conceived of teaching as a job for spinsters,” an occupation that could “ease the stigma of being unwed”27 and permit unmarried women to nurture young children and thus fulfill their domestic calling, even without offspring of their own. ~ Rebecca Traister,

181: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. ~ Horace Mann,

182:The soul of the truly benevolent man does not seem to reside much in his own body. Its life, to a great extent, is a mere reflex of the lives of others. It migrates into their bodies, and identifying its existence with their existence, finds its own happiness in increasing and prolonging their pleasures, in extinguishing or solacing their pains. ~ Horace Mann,

183:Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science. ~ Horace Mann,

184:Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. ~ John Taylor Gatto,

185: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. ~ Horace Mann,

186:Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. 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. ~ Horace Mann,

187:Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed. ~ Horace Mann,

188:Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates. ~ Horace Mann,

189:In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, is only a sort of human oyster bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worms' banquet. ~ Horace Mann,

190: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. ~ Horace Mann,

191:So, in the infinitely nobler battle in which you are engaged against error and wrong, if ever repulsed or stricken down, may you always be solaced and cheered by the exulting cry of triumph over some abuse in Church or State, some vice or folly in society, some false opinion or cruelty or guilt which you have overcome! And I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. ~ Horace Mann,

192:The first generation of school reformers I talk about - nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann, Catharine Beecher - they are true believers in their vision for public education. They have a missionary zeal. And this to me connects them a lot to folks today, whether it's education activist Campbell Brown or former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. It's a righteous sense, a reform push that's driven by a strong belief in a particular set of solutions. ~ Dana Goldstein,

193:In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general. ~ Louis Agassiz,

194: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. ~ Horace Mann,

195:If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstructs its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal. ~ Horace Mann,

196: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? ~ Horace Mann,

197: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. ~ Horace Mann,

198:In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman. ~ Horace Mann,

199:So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity! ~ Horace Mann,

200: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. ~ Horace Mann,

201:Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator. ~ Horace Mann,

202:Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. ~ John Taylor Gatto,

203:He who wishes to fulfill his mission must be a man of one idea, that is, of one great overmastering purpose, overshadowing all his aims, and guiding and controlling his entire life. —Bate. The shortest way to do anything is to do only one thing at a time. —Cecil. The power of concentration is one of the most valuable of intellectual attainments. —Horace Mann. The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. —Emerson. Careful attention to one thing often proves superior to genius and art. —Cicero. "It puffed like a locomotive," said a boy of the donkey engine; "it whistled like the steam-cars, but it didn't go anywhere." The world is full of donkey-engines, of people who can whistle and puff and pull, but they don't go anywhere, they have no definite aim, no controlling purpose. ~ Orison Swett Marden,

204:I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I’d come to accept it.
And I understood that it didn’t make them any better than me. ~ Diana Peterfreund,

205:The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies. ~ Horace Mann,

206:The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common
school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at
precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then
mass marketing.

The common school (now called a public school) was a brand new concept, created shortly after
the Civil War. “Common” because it was for everyone, for the kids of the farmer, the kids of
the potter, and the kids of the local shopkeeper. Horace Mann is generally regarded as the
father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine—
because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial
economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The
common school solved both problems.

The normal school (now called a teacher’s college) was developed to indoctrinate teachers into
the system of the common school, ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the
processing of students. If this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk,
of interchangeable parts, of the notion of measurement and quality, it’s not an accident.

The world has changed, of course. It has changed into a culture fueled by a market that knows
how to mass-customize, to find the edges and the weird, and to cater to what the individual
demands instead of insisting on conformity.

Mass customization of school isn’t easy. Do we have any choice, though? If mass production
and mass markets are falling apart, we really don’t have the right to insist that the schools we
designed for a different era will function well now. ~ Seth Godin,

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