Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Addams
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Jane Addams.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.
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.
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
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.
One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations.
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.
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?
I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.
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?
National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.
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.
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.
Of all aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.
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.
We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory.
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.
The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional incentive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.
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.
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!
It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.
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.
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.
Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.
The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.
We all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.
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 worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.
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.
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.
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.
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 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.
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.
Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others.
Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment.
Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.
It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
Young people need pleasure as truly as they need food and air.
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.
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.
Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.
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.
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.
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. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?
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