Jane Addams Quotes
Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.
America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.
I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.
Only in time of fear is government thrown back to its primitive and sole function of self-defense and the many interests of which it is the guardian become subordinate to that.
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
We forget that the accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to life itself.
Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.
Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.
Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others.
This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.
I believe that peace is not merely an absence of war but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process.
The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.
With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!
Life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole.
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be.
The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep.
When the sense of justice seeks to express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster.
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.
Must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.
The cheap drama brings cause and effect, will power and action, once more into relation and gives a man the thrilling conviction that he may yet be master of his fate.
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.
An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental.
A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.
The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself.
The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent.
If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.
It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved in one process as the other.