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If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.

Horace Mann

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Horace Mann
Age: 63 †
Born: 1796
Born: May 4
Died: 1859
Died: August 2
American Politician
Lawyer
Politician
University Teacher
Franklin
Massachusetts
Never
Dozen
Perfectly
Express
Ten
Understood
Words
Use

More quotes by Horace Mann

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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.
Horace Mann
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He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
Horace Mann
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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.
Horace Mann
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Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.
Horace Mann
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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
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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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A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.
Horace Mann
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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
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The pulpit only teaches to be honest the market-place trains to overreaching and fraud and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good.
Horace Mann
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When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.
Horace Mann
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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
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When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?
Horace Mann
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A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
Horace Mann
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A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.
Horace Mann
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Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
Horace Mann
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Willmott has very tersely said that embellished truths are the illuminated alphabet of larger children.
Horace Mann
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It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
Horace Mann
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Bodies are cleansed by water the mind is purified by truth.
Horace Mann
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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
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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.
Horace Mann