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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
Understood
Words
Use
Never
Dozen
Perfectly
Express
Ten

More quotes by Horace Mann

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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
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After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.
Horace Mann
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The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.
Horace Mann
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The Chinese have an excellent proverb: Be modest in speech, but excel in action.
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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The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
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
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It is well to think well it is divine to act well.
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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Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Horace Mann
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When a child can be brought to tears, not from fear of punishment, but from repentance for his offence, he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from grief at one's own conduct, be sure there is an angel nestling in the bosom.
Horace Mann
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The object of punishment is, prevention from evil it never can be made impulsive to good.
Horace Mann
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Reproof is a medicine, like mercury or opium if it be improperly administered, it will do harm instead of good.
Horace Mann
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As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.
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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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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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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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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Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
Horace Mann
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Education must bring the practice as nearly as possible to the theory. As the children now are, so will the sovereigns soon be.
Horace Mann