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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the futility of laws in the face of a morally corrupt public mindset.
Horace Mann's quote emphasizes that when the moral fabric of society decays, laws become ineffective at protecting rights and freedoms. The metaphor of printed notices in an orchard signifies that no amount of legal enforcement can safeguard against corruption if the populace lacks integrity.
In practice
In a debate about the role of laws in society, this quote can illustrate the limitations of legal systems without a moral foundation.
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.
I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky, and I was missing it.
Dreaming of a tomorrow, which tomorrow, will be as distant then as 'tis today.
The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles o popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams
If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value.
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