American social worker (1860-1935)
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
Let us take, for a moment, George Washington as a statesman. What was it he did, during those days when they were framing a Constitution, when they were meeting together night after night, and trying to adjust the rights and privileges of every class in the community? What was it that sustained him during all those days, all those weeks, during all those months and years? It was the belief that they were founding a nation on the axiom that all men are created free and equal. What would George Washington say if he found that, among us, there were causes constantly operating against that equality?
JANE ADDAMS
address to the Union League Club of Chicago, Feb. 23, 1903
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
Twenty Years at Hull-House
All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to their attitude toward the social order itself; toward the dreary round of uninteresting work, the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite, the declining consciousness of brain power, and the lack of mental food which characterizes the lot of the large proportion of their fellow citizens. These men and women have caught a moral challenge raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered, others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their actual relations to the basic organization of society.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
We all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have "arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
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
Twenty Years at Hull-House
A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.
JANE ADDAMS
address before the Chicago Political Equality League, 1897
Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
JANE ADDAMS
Peace and Bread in Time of War
Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
The lessons of great men 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 ideals.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics
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.
JANE ADDAMS
address before the Chicago Political Equality League, 1897
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
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 power of cooperation which should be effective against them.
JANE ADDAMS
Twenty Years at Hull-House
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
Peace and Bread in Time of War
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.
JANE ADDAMS
Democracy and Social Ethics