Quotes from Jane Addams

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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.

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.

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.

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heart-breaking as unemployment...

Lawrence Freedman