Activists From The United States

"The truth is, successful investing is a kind of alchemy."

"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."

"God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked."

"Anyone who has read anything of Horace Mann knows that he is a sort of patron saint of progressive education not only because of his ideas (very advanced for his day) about the way children should be treated, not only because he advocated a personal and humane atmosphere in the school in the relation of children and teachers, but because, above all, he was the prophet of the idea of the absolute necessity of free public education for the existence and preservation of a democratic way of life; or, as he said in the phraseology of his time, "republican institutions of self-government.""

"The 1830s, in fact, gave rise to an educational awakening, led by such reformers as Horace Mann, James G. Carter, Henry Barnard, and William Russell, all of whom used Massachusetts and other New England states as their laboratory. Their crusading helped to generate public support for common schools. Mann, acknowledged as the father of the common school movement, argued that these institutions should be publicly controlled, publicly supported, and open to all."

"Control of children and their education is control of the future. Humanists have always understood this. Horace Mann, James G. Carter, and their many associates (including Senator Charles G. Sumner) were all Unitarians; they hated the Puritan faith of their forefathers with a passion. Their purpose in promoting state control of education was twofold. First, they rightfully understood that the only way to destroy Biblical faith was to control the schools and, little by little, remove Christianity and introduce Humanism. Second, they were Centralists or statist, men who believed that salvation comes by work of statist legislation or law."

"I would ask, if this modesty is not attractive also, when manifested in the other sex? It was strikingly marked in Horace Mann, when presiding over the late National Educational Convention in this city. The retiring modesty of William Ellery Channing was beautiful, as well as of many others who have filled elevated stations in society. These virtues, differing as they may in degree in man and woman, are of the same nature, and call forth our admiration wherever manifested."

"The process did not begin with Horace Mann, although he probably did more to humanize American education in the nineteenth century than any other educator, and thus we tend to trace humanistic roots back to him. Mann was vigorously opposed by ministers of his day, who foresaw the shift from a biblical to a humanistic base for education, but their resistance was gradually overcome."

"He is a delightful companion and friend, and among all the excellent men whom we met in Boston, none entwined themselves more deeply and closely with our affections than 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."

"Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us."

"If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it."

"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."

"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."

"Evil and good are God's right hand and left."

"Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments."

"Knowledge is a mimic creation."

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

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

"Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect."

"Physics is the Science of Matter; Metaphysics the Science of Mind — the Science of Being, apart from accidents and properties — Ontology."

"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."

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

"Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms."

"It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one."

"Be sure of the fact, before you lose time in searching for a cause."

"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."

"You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth."

"Just in proportion as a man becomes good, divine, Christ-like, he passes out of the region of theorizing, of system-building, and hireling service, into the region of beneficent activities. It is well to think well. It is divine to act well."

"How strong that idea of improvement in the human mind, which is the companion, if it be not the condition of genius!— that ideality, I mean, which always runs ahead of actuality. Achievement is only the eminence whence we survey something better to be achieved. Ideality is only the avant-courier of the mind, and where that, in a healthy and normal state, goes, I hold it to be a prophecy that realization can follow."

"No matter how seemingly unconnected with human affairs or remote from human interests a newly-discovered truth may appear to be, time and genius will some day make it minister to human welfare. When Dr. Franklin was once sceptically asked what was the use of some recondite and far-off truth which had just been brought to light, "What," said he, "is the use of babies?""

"We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital. As Satan said, "Evil, be thou my good," so they say, "Darkness, be thou my light.""

"The intellectual and moral nature of man is the one thing precious in the sight of God; and therefore, until this nature is cultivated, and enlightened, and purified, neither opulence, nor power, nor learning, nor genius, nor domestic sanctity, nor the holiness of God's altars, can ever be safe. Until the immortal and god-like capacities of every being that comes iuto the world are deemed more worthy, are watched more tenderly than any other thing, no dynasty of men, or form of government, can stand, or shall stand, upon the face of the earth; and the force or the fraud which would seek to uphold them, shall be but "as fetters of flax to bind the flame.""

"Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge."

"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."

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

"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."

"We put things in order; God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west,— it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is."

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

"The intellect is the light of the mind. The appetites, impulses, affections, sentiments,— whatever we please to call them,— have their objects of desire; but they know not how to obtain them. The intellect points out or devises the means by which their ends can be reached. They inform the intellect what they want; the intellect discerns and adopts the measures necessary to their gratification. The intellect performs the office of a pilot; but what shall become of the vessel and its treasures, if the pilot is blind?"

"The creation is a museum, all full, and crowded with wonders and beauties and glories. One door, and one only is open, by which you can enter this magnificent temple. It is the door of Knowledge. The learned laborer, the learned peasant, or slave, is ever made welcome at this door, while the ignorant, though kings, are shut out."

"If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education."

"Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it."

"Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate! To spend several days in a friend’s house and hunger for something to read, while you are treading on costly carpets, sitting upon luxurious chairs and sleeping upon down, is as if one were bribing your body for the sake of cheating your mind."

"Men are not accustomed to buy books unless they want them. If, on visiting the dwelling of a man of slender means, I find the reason why he has cheap carpets and very plain furniture to be that he may purchase books, he rises at once in my esteem. Books are not made for furniture but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."

"The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good."

"Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike."

"The most ignorant are the most conceited. Unless a man knows that there is something more to be known, his inference is, of course, that he knows every thing. Such a man always usurps the throne of universal knowledge, and assumes the right of deciding all possible questions. We all know that a conceited dunce will decide questions extemporaneous which would puzzle a college of philosophers, or a bench of judges. Ignorant and shallow-minded men do not see far enough to see the difficulty. 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. And for all purposes of individual character, as well as of social usefulness, it is quite as important for a man to know the extent of his own ignorance as it is to know any thing else. To know how much there is that we do not know, is one of the most valuable parts of our attainments; for such knowledge becomes both a lesson of humility and a stimulus to exertion."

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

"Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity."