Quotes from Jane Addams

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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

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

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

If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong;

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

We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

The identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience, because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and jostle of the crowd.

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.