Jane Addams Quotes

Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

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

That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.

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.

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

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.

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

Keep friends close but keep enemies closer.

It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand.

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.

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

The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.

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.

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

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.

But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.