Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 - August 2, 1859) was an American education reformist. Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in his Whig Party, for building public schools. Most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers. Mann has been credited by educational historians as the "Father of the Common School Movement". (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows.
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. We must purposely be kind and generous, or we miss the best part of existence. The heart which goes out of itself gets large and full. This is the great secret of the inner life. We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Dynasties and governments used to be attacked and defended by arms; now the attack and the defence are mainly carried on by types. (referring to the printing press)
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
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.
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
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.
Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
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.
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.
Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
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.
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
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.
Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.
The most ignorant are the most conceited.
The poniard and the stiletto were once the resource of a murderous spirit; now the vengeance, which formerly would assassinate in the dark, libels character, in the light of day, through the medium of the press.
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.
Whether a young man shall reap pleasure or pain from winning the objects of his choice, depends, not only upon his wisdom or folly in selecting those objects, but upon the right or wrong methods by which he pursues them.
Categories: Horace Mann, Quotes of the day
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