1796-1859, American Educator
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. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
Horace Mann – [Books and Reading]
A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
Horace Mann – [Education]
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.
Horace Mann – [Teachers and Teaching]
Avoid witicisms at the expense of others.
Horace Mann – [Wit]
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann – [Victory]
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
Horace Mann – [Education]
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 – [Education]
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
Horace Mann – [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.
Horace Mann – [Generosity]
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Horace Mann – [Habit]
I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles, but a good deal about their acts.
Horace Mann – [Action]
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
Horace Mann – [Habit]
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
Horace Mann – [Truth]
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
Horace Mann – [Ignorance]
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
Horace Mann – [Martyrdom]
It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.
Horace Mann – [Character]
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 – [School]
Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
Horace Mann – [Morality]
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 – [Time and Time Management]
Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
Horace Mann – [Manners]