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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
Perfectly
Express
Ten
Understood
Words
Use
Never
Dozen

More quotes by Horace Mann

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Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
Horace Mann
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Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.
Horace Mann
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The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
Horace Mann
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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
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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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As all truth is from God, it necessarily follows that true science and true religion can never be at variance.
Horace Mann
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He who cannot resist temptation is not a man.
Horace Mann
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We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Horace Mann
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Be careful never to retire to rest in a room not properly ventilated.
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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Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.
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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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.
Horace Mann
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You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing it encourages much.
Horace Mann
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In what pagan nation was Moloch ever propitiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, intemperance.
Horace Mann
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No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of 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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Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.
Horace Mann
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If you wish to write well, study the life about you,--life in the public streets.
Horace Mann
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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.
Horace Mann