Jane Addams Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.”
-- Jane Addams

#Honesty #Integrity #Character

“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.”
-- Jane Addams

#Peace #Motivation #Suicidal

“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”
-- Jane Addams

#Expression #Ethics #Action

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

#Inspiring #Peace #Equality

“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?”
-- Jane Addams

#Race #Failing #Possibility

“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

#Education #Children #Future

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

#Attitude #Army #Men

“Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.”
-- Jane Addams

#Doe #Charity #Moral

“Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.”
-- Jane Addams

#Numbers #Cities #Justice

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

#Real #Patriotism #Progress

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

#Women #Memorable #Feet

“One's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations.”
-- Jane Addams

#Alive #Relation #Humans

“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.”
-- Jane Addams

#Men #Realizing #He Man

“Pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment.”
-- Jane Addams

#Human Nature #Environment #Humans

“It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep ...”
-- Jane Addams

#Promise #Purpose #Dupes

“The very word woman in the writings of the church fathers stood for the basest of temptations... As women were lowered in the moral scale because of their identification with her at the very bottom of the pit, so they cannot rise themselves save as they succeed in lifting her with whose sins they are weighed.”
-- Jane Addams

#Father #Writing #Temptation

“It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.”
-- Jane Addams

#People #Way #Happy People

“I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. 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.”
-- Jane Addams

#Believe #Teaching #Mold

“Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.”
-- Jane Addams

#Pride #Hospitality #Buried

“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. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?”
-- Jane Addams

#Men #Race #Order

“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.”
-- Jane Addams

#Men #Regulation #Habit

“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!”
-- Jane Addams

#Mother #Children #Stupid

“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.”
-- Jane Addams

#Pigs #Understanding #Trying

“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 ...”
-- Jane Addams

#Cities #Effort #Problem

“The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.”
-- Jane Addams

#Play #Cities #Temples

“A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?”
-- Jane Addams

#Cities #May #Corporations

“It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code.”
-- Jane Addams

#Successful #Giving #Achievement

“It is as easy for most of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much voluntary morality involved in one process as the other.”
-- Jane Addams

#Dinner #Poverty #Morality

“when the sense of justice seeks to express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in disaster ...”
-- Jane Addams

#Journey #Government #Justice

“That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.”
-- Jane Addams

#Numbers #Empathy #Able