Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Jane Addamswas a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She created the first Hull House. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped America to address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth6 September 1860
CityCedarville, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Jane Addams quotes about
A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."
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.
The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent.
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.
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 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.
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty.
That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
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.
The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
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.
We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.
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.