Jane Addams Quotes

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.

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.

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

The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.

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.

Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

democracy is that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.

We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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.

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.

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.