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Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

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
First
Capacity
Enterprise
Men
Conditions
Condition
Effort
Destroy
Desire
Slavery
Nature
Ambition
Bettering
Firsts
Touch
Mainspring
Human
Constitution
Enslave
Humans
Spring
Snaps

More quotes by 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.
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The education already given to the people creates the necessity of giving them more.
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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.
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Schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications.
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A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
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Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
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Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.
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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.
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Patient perseverance in well doing is infinitely harder than a sudden and impulsive self-sacrifice.
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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.
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We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
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It is well to think well it is divine to act well.
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You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it but let all you tell be truth.
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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, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
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The devil tempts men through their ambition, their cupidity, or their appetite, until he comes to the profane swearer, whom he clutches without any reward.
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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.
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If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
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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.
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Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.
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But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.
Horace Mann