Who was Horace Mann?
Horace Mann was an American educational reformer, slavery abolitionist, 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 (1848–1853). From September 1852 to his death, he served as President of Antioch College.
Born in Massachusetts in 1796, Mann grew up in hardships and poverty and hardly received any schooling. However, he educated himself at the public library in Franklin.
At the age of 20, Mann enrolled in Brown University in Rhode Island, where he found great interest in education, politics, and social reform. He soon went on to become a successful American educator and advocate.
Horace Mann is regarded as one of the greatest educational reformists in history, bringing about change for the betterment of children and society; he is, therefore, known as the Father of American Education.
Who would not want a post of Horace Mann Quotes after reading so much about him?
Page Contents:
- Top 30 Horace Mann Quotes which will inspire you
- Horace Mann Quotes about Education
- Who was Horace Mann?
Top 30 Horace Mann Quotes which will inspire you
1. “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
2. “A house without books is like a room without windows.”
3. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
4. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.”
5. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.”
6. “Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!”
7. “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.”
8. “Do not think of knocking out another person’s brain 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.”
9. “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”
10. “A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”
11. “It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.”
12. “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.”
13. “No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.”
14. “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
15. “Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen”
16. “If any man seeks greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”
17. “Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.”
18. “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.”
19. “The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people.”
20. “Children learn to read by being in the presence of books.”
21. “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 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.”
22. “Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.”
23. “Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.”
24. “The best teachers teach from the heart, not the book.”
25. “Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it every day and soon it cannot be broken.”
26. “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.”
27. “The most ignorant are the most conceited.”
28. “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.”
29. “Affectation hides three times as many virtues as a charity does sin.”
30. “all the members of society have a direct interest in the manners of each of its individuals because each one is a radiating point, the center of a circle which he fills with pleasure or annoyance, not only for those who voluntarily enter it but for those, who, in the promiscuous movements of society, are caught within its circumference.”
Horace Mann Quotes about Education
- Republics, one after another . . . have perished from want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people.” -Horace Mann
2. A human being is not attaining his full height until he is educated.
3. Jails and prisons are the complements of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
4. 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.
5. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
6. Education is a capital to the poor man and an interest to the rich man.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
10. It is far more difficult, I assure you, to live for the truth than to die for it.
11. Education is a capital to the poor man and an interest to the rich man.
12. The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.
13. A house without books is like a room without windows.
14. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
15. Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.
16. Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.
17. 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, skilled artisans and scientific farmers, scholars, and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
18. Great books are written for Christianity much more oftener than great deeds are done for them. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.
19. Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.
20. “Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.” -Horace Mann
