Horace Mann
Horace Mann
Horace Mannwas an American politician and educational reformer. A Whig devoted to promoting speedy modernization, he served in the Massachusetts State legislature. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Historian Ellwood P. Cubberley asserts:...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth4 May 1796
CityFranklin, MA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Whatever statesman or sage will effect reforms upon a gigantic or godlike scale must begin with the young.
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.
Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
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.
To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is.
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.
The earth endured Christ's ministry only three years;--not three weeks after his real character and purposes were generally known.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
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.