Political Quotes

Horace Mann: “Those who cannot read, can hear; and if you are to keep from them the perpetually recurring sights and sounds which must…”

On the record
Those who cannot read, can hear; and if you are to keep from them the perpetually recurring sights and sounds which must awaken the quick instincts of liberty, you must extinguish their eyes, and seal up their ears in everlasting silence.
Said by
Horace Mann
Free Soil · Massachusetts

Editor's note · Context

Mann argues that denying education and awareness to enslaved individuals is akin to silencing their instincts for freedom.

Share

More from Horace Mann

The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.

gutenberg.org

A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.

gutenberg.org

Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?

gutenberg.org

Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.

gutenberg.org

Other voices in this conversation