Jane Addams Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. (U.S. Social Worker, 1860-1935)

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

Jane Addams, writing about her Twenty Years at Hull House, said, “People did not want to hear about simple things. They wanted to hear about great things—simply told.

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.

Nothing can be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort which might have saved the world.

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

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

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.

Jane Addams too knew that Chicago's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago, like John the Baptist and Bathhouse John, like Billy Sunday and Big Bill, forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers, one for hustlers and one for squares.

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

Jane Addams put it (likely in direct response to the Emerson quote, which she’d recorded three years prior in her journal): “To do what you are afraid to do is to guide your life by fear. How much better not to be afraid to do what you believe in doing! Keep one main idea, and you will never be lost.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

For action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics.

As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.

We have a large circle—all of them anti-Hitler,” one participant told Inge. “And each of these friends has his own separate circle which is anti-Hitler, and so on and so forth: a great underground network against Hitler. If only someone could get them to act collectively.

We stand today united in a belief in beauty, genius, and courage, and that these can transform the world.

Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.

Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nonviolent pacifist organization founded during World War I. Its members and leaders had included Jane Addams and Norman Thomas; its message was the possibility of bringing an unruly world into good order through acts of conscience. As Lawson was to put it, “Nonviolent revolution is always a real, serious revolution. It seeks to transform human life in both private and public forms… involves the whole man in his whole existence… maintains balance between tearing down and building up, destroying and planting.

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join the great forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. “To love mercy” and at the same time “to do justly” is the difficult task; to fulfil the first requirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate giving with all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is to obtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a dreary lack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice is impossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never be attained save as we fulfil still the third requirement—“to walk humbly with God,” which may mean to walk for many dreary miles beside the lowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which the company of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather with the pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjected whenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life.

Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community is confronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact that the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that which may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice between virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimes incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see anything but the unlovely struggle itself.

Female activists accused male businessmen of knowingly dodging their taxes over the course of decades, as politicians looked the other way. After Haley gave an exhaustive report on thirty years of Illinois tax history, the stately Jane Addams rose to frame the fight in more visceral, sentimental terms. Additional tax revenue could pay not only for higher teacher salaries, she said, but also for better public sanitation, to protect poor children’s health. When businessmen evade taxes, “property … loses its moral value,” Addams said, and she called on the entire community to unite to “bring [businessmen] back to a sense of moral obligation, in order to make it seem righteous to pay taxes—because I imagine that to many men, it seems righteous to evade taxes if you can do it in the interests of the stockholder.

A life is like a poem: Its content is inspired partly by unconscious feelings but also by mindful judgment.

We can all recall acquaintances of whose integrity of purpose we can have no doubt, but who cause much confusion as they proceed to the accomplishment of that purpose, who indeed are often insensible to their own mistakes and harsh in their judgments of other people because they are so confident of their own inner integrity.

Herman Munster from The Addams Family.

Two “fairly sure” historical figures were Abraham Lincoln (“in his last years”) and Thomas Jefferson. Seven “highly probable public and historical figures” included Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley, and Baruch Spinoza.

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized. I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge that her daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked up from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I was young, my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always had musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish little songs and waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day." The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

I once read that the sociologist Jane Addams called this burden the “family claim,” two words that explain it well enough: a bond—no, a bondage, braided of strands of guilt, duty, and affection.

We know instinctively,” Jane Addams wrote, “that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.

But stranger than any episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.

I recall that in planning my first European journey I had soberly hoped in two years to trace the entire pattern of human excellence as we passed from one country to another, in the shrines popular affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues erected to heroes, and in the "worn blasonry of funeral brasses" - an illustration that when we are young we all long for those mountaintops upon which we may soberly stand and dream of our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at righteousness.

Se declaraba «filosóficamente convencida de la futilidad de la oposición activa, y creía que la agresión y el mal solo pueden vencerse con el bien, y no vale la pena oponerse a ello». La pobreza, la enfermedad y la explotación eran un reto para la sociedad en su conjunto y el reto debería solucionarse mediante fórmulas de reconciliación, antes de que condujeran a conflictos que pudieran desgarrar la propia sociedad. Describía el Evangelio como «un símbolo expansivo de fraternidad, un vínculo de paz, un bendito lugar donde la unidad del espíritu podía reivindicar el derecho a superar todas las diferencias».[26] Sin embargo, su encuentro con Tolstói fue decepcionante. El escritor prestó poca atención a su descripción de Hull House, al tiempo que «miraba con desconfianza las mangas de mi vestido de viaje». La cantidad de tela que tenían sus mangas, dijo Tolstói, era suficiente para vestir a un montón de niñas. ¿No era eso «un muro que separaba a la gente»? Y cuando supo que tenía una granja en Illinois, ¿no se podía considerar una de aquellas «señoras rentistas»? Sugirió que Jane Addams sería más útil «poniéndose a cultivar sus tierras» que añadiendo al mundo otra ciudad superpoblada. Las acusaciones eran injustas, pero aquello afectó a Jane hasta el punto que, cuando regresó a Chicago, decidió pasar dos horas diarias en la lechería. Lo intentó, pero fracasó. No era la mejor manera de aprovechar su tiempo.[27] Esta pequeña anécdota revela por qué no podía ser una verdadera seguidora de Tolstói.

Jane Addams

And Sophie wrote: “We carry all our standards within ourselves, only we don’t look for them closely enough. Perhaps because they are the severest standards.

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and the opera house. In the latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of he classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.

I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however prepared I might be. It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase "the snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

There is no doubt that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement. We have all been at times entertained by the futile efforts of half a dozen highly individualized people gathered together as a committee. Their aimless attempts to find a common method of action have recalled the wavering motion of a baby’s arm before he has learned to coördinate his muscles.

Samuel Johnson once remarked that it was surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contained.

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that “Ethics” is but another word for “righteousness,” that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless.