Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.
Interpretation
The people who initially shape our thoughts and beliefs have a significant impact on our lives.
This quote by Horace Mann emphasizes the importance of early influences in shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Those who guide or mentor us at the outset often have a lasting effect on our development and worldview, which underscores the responsibility of educators, leaders, and parents in establishing positive directions for younger minds.
In practice
In a motivational speech about education.
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.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
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.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
The greatest tragedy to befall a person is to have sight but lack vision.
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness: a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say 'no.' But saying 'yes' begins things. Saying 'yes' is how things grow.
In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.
I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.
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