Jane Addams Quotes

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 his earlier years of a miller’s life.

The common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him who would approach it.

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 ...

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

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

The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

… this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.

The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.

If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.

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.

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 ...

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

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?