"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."

“Lawrence A. Cremin, Horace Mann, Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

“Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach.”

“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.”

“A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.”

“He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. He is wanting in the highest attributes of humanity.”

“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?”