Quotes About Jane Addams

#1. Jane Addams, writing about her Twenty Years at Hull House, said, People did not want to hear about simple things. They wanted to hear about great things - simply told.

Fred Rogers

#2. As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.

Erik Larson

#3. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, "How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?" It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer
a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.

Bill Ayers

#4. Nothing can be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.

Jane Addams

#5. In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#7. Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#9. 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.

Jane Addams

#10. Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.

Jane Addams

#11. 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.

Jane Addams

#12. A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#14. 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.

Jane Addams

#15. If the meanest man in the republic is deprived of his rights,then every man in the republic is deprived of his rights.

Jane Addams

#16. I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father's had become,
during his earlier years of a miller's life.

Jane Addams

#17. 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.

Jane Addams

#18. All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.

Jane Addams

#19. The things that make us alike are stronger and finer than the things that make us different.

Jane Addams

#20. 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.

Jane Addams

#21. The supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution.

Jane Addams

#22. 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.

Jane Addams

#23. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jane Addams

#24. 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.

Jane Addams

#25. Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.

Jane Addams

#26. True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.

Jane Addams

#27. 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.

Jane Addams

#28. 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!

Jane Addams

#29. A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#31. A long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.

Jane Addams

#32. Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. (U.S. Social Worker, 1860-1935)

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#34. 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.

Jane Addams

#35. The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness, who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments of irritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is still admiration, because he is rich and successful.

Jane Addams

#36. National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.

Jane Addams

#37. Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others.

Jane Addams

#38. Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.

Jane Addams

#39. Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.

Jane Addams

#40. 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?

Jane Addams

#41. Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.

Jane Addams

#42. 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.

Jane Addams

#43. A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#45. 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.

Jane Addams

#46. 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.

Jane Addams

#47. 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.

Jane Addams

#48. 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 ...

Jane Addams

#49. Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

Jane Addams

#50. But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.

Jane Addams

#51. 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.

Jane Addams

#52. 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.

Jane Addams

#53. If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.

Jane Addams

#54. 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.

Jane Addams

#55. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.

Jane Addams

#56. 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.

Jane Addams

#57. 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.

Jane Addams

#58. That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.

Jane Addams

#59. Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#62. 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.

Jane Addams

#63. When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into the cultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the result may become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated over with the result of its own endeavor to be attractive.

Jane Addams

#64. The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional incentive.

Jane Addams

#65. 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.

Jane Addams

#66. Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.

Jane Addams

#67. If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.

Jane Addams

#68. A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#70. The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels.

Jane Addams

#71. 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.

Jane Addams

#72. To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

Jane Addams

#73. One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations.

Jane Addams

#74. Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Jane Addams

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

Jane Addams

#76. Democracy is that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.

Jane Addams

#77. The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.

Jane Addams