Jane Addams

To “protect the weak” has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of “the white man.”

There is a growing conviction among workingmen of all countries that, whatever may be accomplished by a national war, however high the supposed moral aim of such a war, there is one inevitable result—an increased standing army, the …

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, …

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

That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

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

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

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

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

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.

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

With all the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!

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 ...

… 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.

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 …

[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.