Horace Mann quotes

Horace Mann was an American education reformer and politician, recognized as the "Father of American Public Education." His efforts helped establish free, non-sectarian public schools and professional training for teachers across the United States. He believed that education was key to individual and societal progress. Here are 84 of his quotes:

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

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

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

Horace Mann

Two golden hours somewhere between sunrise and sunset. Both are set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered. They are gone forever.

Horace Mann

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Horace Mann

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.

Horace Mann

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

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

Habit is a cable we weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.

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

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

If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.

Horace Mann

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

Horace Mann

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

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

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

Horace Mann

Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.

Horace Mann

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.

Horace Mann

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

Horace Mann

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

Horace Mann

Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.

Horace Mann

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.

Horace Mann