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.

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

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.

What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them?

I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

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.

Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.

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.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

The lessons of great men and women are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves; they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideas.

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.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

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.

It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.

You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!

The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.

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.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.

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.

Young people need pleasure as truly as they need food and air.

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.

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an unequivocal position.

The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.

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.

It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code.

What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.

Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.

The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.

In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's "Messiah," it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but the differences of training and cultivation between them and the voices in the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive.

Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.

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.

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.

The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep.