Quotes by Jane Addams

“True peace is not merely the absence of war, it is the presence of justice.”

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

“Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.”

“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...”

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

“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.”

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

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

“The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.”

“These young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the commo...”

“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 t...”

“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 advoca...”

“In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“[The Settlement House] 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 drunk...”

“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 am...”

“We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life’s very misfortunes a pow...”