Horace Mann was an American educational reformer and Whig politician known for his commitment to promoting public education. In 1848, after public service as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives . From September 1852 to his death, he served as President of Antioch College.
He then studied law for a short time in Wrentham, Massachusetts and was a tutor of Latin and Greek ( and a librarian at Brown. During 1822, he also studied at Litchfield Law School and, in 1823, was admitted to the bar in Dedham, Massachusetts. These Horace Mann quotes will motivate you.
Best Horace Mann Quotes
- “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
- “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
- “Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” ~ Horace Mann
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“On entering this world our starting-point is ignorance. None, however, but idiots remain there.” ~ Horace Mann
- “A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.” ~ Horace Mann
- “If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
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“Education is a capital to the poor man, and an interest to the rich man.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.” ~ Horace Mann
- “A house without books is like a room without windows.” ~ Horace Mann, Horace Mann quotes on books
- “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
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“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.” ~ Horace Mann
- “The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.” ~ Horace Mann, Horace Mann quotes teachers
- “There is nothing so costly as ignorance.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “School is the cheapest police.” ~ Horace Mann
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“Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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, Horace Mann quotes education
- “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, Horace Mann quotes be ashamed
- “It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.” ~ Horace Mann
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“To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “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
- “The Chinese have an excellent proverb: “Be modest in speech, but excel in action.” ~ Horace Mann, Horace Mann quotes chinese
- “When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?” ~ Horace Mann
- “Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.” ~ Horace Mann
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“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
- “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
- “Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
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“As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “You may as well borrow a person’s money as his time.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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, Horace Mann quotes unfaithfulness
- “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
- “Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.” ~ Horace Mann
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“Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “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
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“It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.” ~ Horace Mann
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“If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.” ~ Horace Mann
- “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
- “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
- “The living soul of man, once conscious of its power, cannot be quelled.” ~ Horace Mann
