QUOTES BY Jane Addams

The cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

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

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.

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.

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 effective against them.

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 ...

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!

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

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.

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

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