Selected Jane Addams Quotations
• 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 good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
• Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.
• In his own way each man must struggle, lest the normal law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.
• Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
• Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.
• Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.
• We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.
• We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith.
• Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.
• The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.
• Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people.
• Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
• I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
• National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.
• An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom as these conditions imply low rental.
• America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.
• The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
• The excellent becomes the permanent.
• Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods, for it is true of people who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities are inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily. It has to be diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held in solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will.... It is needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against a restricted view of education.
