Jane Addams quotes

Jane Addams was an American social reformer, pacifist, and leader in women’s suffrage. She co-founded Hull House in Chicago, which became a center for social work and progressive reforms. She remains a pioneering figure in the fields of social justice and humanitarianism. Here are 36 of her quotes:

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men. (Jane Addams)
Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment ... View quote
Jane Addams
Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited. View quote
Jane Addams
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself. View quote
Jane Addams
If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse. View quote
Jane Addams
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 ... View quote
Jane Addams
... 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. View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
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! View quote
Jane Addams
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. (Jane Addams)
The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it. View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father's had become, during his earlier years of a miller's life. View quote
Jane Addams
Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans. View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty ... View quote
Jane Addams
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 ... View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
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. View quote
Jane Addams
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. (Jane Addams)
Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics. View quote
Jane Addams
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled. View quote
Jane Addams
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself. View quote
Jane Addams
We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir. View quote
Jane Addams