Jane Addams Quotes

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.

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.

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."

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.