Jane Addams
Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.Collection: Patriotism
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.Collection: Future
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.Collection: Attitude
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.Collection: Women
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.
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.Collection: Stronger
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.Collection: Stay Strong
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?Collection: Race
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Peace
You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!Collection: Mean
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.Collection: Numbers
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.Collection: People
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.Collection: Doe
Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.Collection: Enemy
It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.Collection: People
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.Collection: Mixing
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.Collection: Forget
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.Collection: Hands
The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.Collection: Principles
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.Collection: Humble
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.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Fear
The supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution.Collection: Religious
The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Blessing
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Responsibility
The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.Collection: Cities
As the acceptance of democracy brings a certain life-giving power, so it has its own sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most obvious one is the curious sense which comes to us from time to time, that we belong to the whole, that a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.Collection: Taken
It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep.Collection: Promise
The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.Collection: Elderly
democracy is that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.Collection: Democracy
The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Teaching
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; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.Collection: Pigs
All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy, which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to act upon them.Collection: Democracy
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.Collection: Ebb And Flow
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."Collection: Wise
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.Collection: Pride
Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.Collection: Serenity
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!Collection: Mother
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.Collection: Spiritual