Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balch
Emily Greene Balchwas an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency. She moved into the peace movement at the start of the World War I in 1914, and began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. She became a central leader of the Women's International League for Peace...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth8 January 1867
CountryUnited States of America
Emily Greene Balch quotes about
As the world community develops in peace, it will open up great untapped reservoirs in human nature.
The future will be determined in part by happenings that it is impossible to foresee; it will also be influenced by trends that are now existent and observable.
As to judging our own time, and thereby gaining some basis for a judgment of future possibilities, we are doubtless not only too close to it to appraise it but too much formed by it and enclosed within it to do so.
A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.
A third ideal that has made its way in the modern world is reliance on reason, especially reason disciplined and enriched by modern science. An eternal basis of human intercommunication is reason.
Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.
It is natural to try to understand one's own time and to seek to analyse the forces that move it.
A dark and terrible side of this sense of community of interests is the fear of a horrible common destiny which in these days of atomic weapons darkens men's minds all around the globe.
The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.
Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.
Those who are rooted in the depths that are eternal and unchangeable and who rely on unshakeable principles, face change full of courage, courage based on faith.
Let us be patient with one another, And even patient with ourselves. We have a long, long way to go. So let us hasten along the road, The road of human tenderness and generosity. Groping, we may find one another's hands in the dark.
There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
These wars appear also to have given its death blow to colonialism and to imperialism in its colonial form, under which weaker peoples were treated as possessions to be economically exploited. At least we hope that such colonialism is on the way out.